Jason asked in the NYRA Forums for people to simply list off why they oppose the Iraq War. So I did. Reposted here for your everlasting enjoyment:

- The one and really only reason for going to war we were presented with initially was WMD. No WMD have been found. At least nothing close to what we were made to believe that would provide any justification for a pre-emptive invasion.

- Pre-emptive war is morally wrong. The reason pre-emptive war is wrong is that it assumed we can with certainty predict another nation will attack us which justifies us hitting them first. For example if someone swings a fist at you you don’t have to wait for the fist to make contact to respond, that makes sense. However as is so often the case we lack perfect information and we lack certainty. That was made abundantly clear with the Iraq war as the WMD claims that acted as the casus belli for the war proved to be false and doctored. So instead of responding to a guy who swung a fist at us, we shot a guy in the back because “he looked shifty”. That is as morally wrong in international affairs as on the street corner.

- It has been made very clear from the testimony of insiders, and the release of documents before and during the war that the Bush Admin intended to invade and cherry picked intelligence to sell the idea. If your desire for war causes you to manipulate the facts instead of the facts creating the desire to go to war, that is a pretty big problem.

- I have seen no convincing evidence that Saddam was a threat to us or to our allies in the region.

- Our focus on Iraq and large commitment of money and troops have taken our attention away from real threats like North Korea.

- The war sent a very bad message to those rogue powers in the “Axis of Evil” and others that Saddam’s greatest mistake was not that he was developing WMD but that he hadn’t yet developed them. North Korea on the other hand who we all believe to already have a bomb is safe from us. Saddam who didn’t have a bomb was not safe. So what does that tell Iran? “We need a bomb, ASAP.”

- America enjoyed a good deal of sympathy and support from the world following 9/11 and many countries joined us in fighting terrorism. Because of Iraq that support evaporated and America has become further villified internationally.

- Not only has this decreased international support affected our European allies, but the Arab street who are even more angry with the United States than before. So instead of cutting of Al Quieda’s base of support we have strengthened it.

- The war was incredibly poorly executed. There was little thought put into what would happen after the invasion. The present instability, violence, and risk of civil war could have absolutely been mitigated if we had some competent leadership with a plan on how to handle the occupation.

- This war is incredibly expensive and continuing to balloon our debt to historic levels. We were all assured that the war would pay for itself because of oil revenue, a promise that has decidedly not come into being.

- With the limited factual basis for this war the government has turned to propaganda and spin to hoodwink the public into going along which I think threatens our open, democratic system. Hinting and suggesting a connection between 9/11 and Saddam is an example. Another example is the bogus “coalition of the willing” made up of 15 soldiers here, 200 soldiers there meant to pretend we had sizable international support when we clearly didn’t.

- The war has been very costly in terms of human lives. Not American lives, we’ve made out exceedingly well, but the minimum of 30,000 Iraqis that have died from this war. Many of them civilians. Many of them from our bombing. This is a number that very few in the media comment on or seem concerned about, but it is horrific and sickening. Yes Saddam is bad, yes it is good to have him gone. But would he have killed 30,000 people in the last three years if he were still in power? And yes I know that even 30,000 is probably not much compared to many other wars, but why do we have to use war as a yard stick in the first place?

- If we believe the after the fact justification about this war being undertaken for purely humanitarian reasons to help the Iraqi people and bring them democracy, is it our place to enforce our structures and morals on the rest of the world? I agree with Bush the candidate that we shouldn’t play policeman to the world. Isn’t that the same rational that the USSR gave for invading countries? Spreading their glorious communist system to the country whether they wanted it or not. Certainly I believe democracy is far superior to communism, but forcing democracy on people is the anti-thesis to democracy. If Iraqis wanted it, we should support them, but let them fight for their freedom. It’ll mean more and hopefully be more stable than if we impose it via stealth bombers. Furthermore if we’ve had this democratic reawakening why aren’t we invading other non-democratic countries?

- The war was executed without explicit approval (i.e. a declaration of war) from either the United Nations or the Congress. Thus making it in violation (in theory) of international law and more importantly the US Constitution. Now granted both international law and the Constitution have sadly become mere suggestions instead of binding law and Presidents for decades have sought it fit to ignore both, but that doesn’t excuse it. Its still wrong.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.