With all this talk about a possible war with Iran, I think that we forget that we are already fighting a war next door to Iran. It was a scary path that we started down in 2003 that led us to the mess we have today. But what exactly happened? Let’s take a little stroll down memory lane and examine this war from its inception.
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When the war began on March 20, 2003, the initial reasons for our attacks were Saddam’s supposed nuclear program and his documented human rights abuses; more specifically, his murder of Kurdish Iraqis.

All right, even though these may be deemed legitimate causes, they must be closely examined.

Saddam’s actions against his citizens while he was in power were horrible, but look at the bigger, global picture. Injustices were occurring all around the world at the time of the invasion and still are. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan continues to do very little to stop the Darfur genocide. Islom Karmirov of Uzbekistan has a documented history of horrendous human rights abuses. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe allows corruption to wreak havoc on his country, whose inflation has risen to about 15,000 percent. Aren’t these all violations of basic human rights? If so, then in accordance with the Bush Administration’s special line of reasoning, they would all qualify as reasons for going to war.
What about the immediate threat of weapons of mass destruction?

Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had such a sordid past. We know for sure that Saddam attempted to develop nuclear technology in the 1980s until Israel destroyed Iraq’s reactors in an air attack. In the ’90s, the U.N. and the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors had been in and out of Iraq a multitude of times in search for WMDs. Although Saddam often turned them away, we now assume that these were bluffs in an attempt to maintain a trump card against the international community. After more than a decade of inspections, Colin Powell made a presentation to the U.N. on February 5, 2003 claiming that Iraq had WMDs.

Unfortunately, he used evidence that has now been widely considered to be falsely interpreted. Nine days later, Hans Blix, the chief inspector of the U.N.s weapons inspection team in Iraq, submitted a report downplaying the concerns posed by Powell, saying that Iraq was complying with resolution 1441, which called for Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations.

To this day, WMDs have not been discovered in Iraq, either due to their crafty concealment or, more likely, their non-existence.
By 2004, we had deposed Saddam and realized that we were looking for something that was never there. We had invaded the country and toppled its government. We realized that Iraq needed a democracy, so in 2005, around 8 million Iraqis participated in the first post-invasion election, establishing a transitional government.

We did not, however, pull out.

With a country so unstable and with such a new, fragile democracy, we remained in Iraq to ensure that the Iraqi government could do its necessary work in order to function properly. But sectarian violence soared, necessitating a surge in troops to control this dangerous new problem, while an old problem reared its ugly head: Al-Qaeda.

Now one of the most clung to moors of our existing presence, it is commonly accepted that Al-Qaeda was neither in Iraq at the onset of the war nor did Saddam have any links to that terrorist organization. On the contrary, Saddam disliked Al-Qaeda, and it is unlikely that he would have allowed it to operate in his country where his absolute power was his own most admired quality. Al-Qaeda only surfaced in Iraq after the United States destabilized the country, months after Saddam was deposed.

I guess you could say that because of us, Al-Qaeda is now present in the destabilized Iraq, adding to the War on Terror and reasons for us to remain in the country.

So this war has been a war for human rights, a war for international security, a war for democracy, and a war for national security. However, with the previously stated evidence, I would say that although a war for human rights is a noble cause, the rights situation in Iraq was not exactly deserving of a full on war. As for international security, WMDs were never found. Even if they were there in the first place, it is plausible that international negotiations, like, let’s say the ones that led to the nuclear disarming of North Korea, could have solved that problem.

The war we intended to fight was begun on flawed pretenses. We are now, however, fighting a very different war than the one we set out to fight, a war that has had many consequences.

When we attacked Iraq in 2003, it was a functioning country with an integrated population, running utilities and a functioning government. Today, neighborhoods where Sunnis, Shi’ias and Kurds once lived in harmony are now overcome with secretarian killings. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions have fled the country. Baghdad has power for a fraction of the day, cholera outbreaks are springing up across the country because of inadequate sanitation and water sources and oil production plants, which were supposed to pay for the reconstruction, are only partially operational.

In the United States, the national deficit is currently $9 trillion. Congress was asked for $190 billion dollars for the war for next spring-while after school programs, biomedical research, and universal child healthcare are denied funding.

With a possible recession on the horizon, we will go into the next decade with the largest deficit in the history of the United States. So, the question must be asked: Do we need another war? I think not. If anything, we should learn from the lessons that Iraq has so painfully taught us.

George Caputa is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.