One of my favorite songs is “Everything Changes” by SOJA. It tackles the issues like war, poverty and selfishness. Sometimes we’re so unaware to things that are going on around the world and we don’t stop to think about how one day that could be us if we don’t take action now. Lines in the song like: “Sleeping at night without a murder and somebody tells you that's something they've never heard of” really explain the difference between our lives and the ones of citizens living in countries with terrorism. Terrorism has controlled Iraq for years and we did nothing about it until it reached our shores during 9/11. Thankfully, our country was smart enough to make some major changes and that included going to war. We realized that we needed to protect ourselves and by doing that we could protect the innocent citizens of Iraq. I believe there are many reasons that made going to war in Iraq a good decision but today I will talk about three of the main ones. First of all, we had reasons to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so therefore we needed to protect ourselves and others. We needed to help Iraq become a strong country by helping improving their government and military through training and the spreading democracy and by that, we would be helping the people. The last reason is that if we don’t go to where terrorism is, terrorism will come to us, again. Not everybody thinks the same way I do so in the next paragraph I will talk about the opposing side’s rationale.
Before 9/11, democratic leaders like Bill Clinton and Al Gore believed that there were WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq and struggled with the issue while they were in office. It was no surprise when this issue became a big part of the war that was initiated by republican President Bush after 9/11. One’s that opposed the war, today say that the evidence was proved wrong because we never found the so called WMDs in Iraq. That may be true but we found proof that they were making the WMDs right up until the end of the war. They say Bush initiated war because he had the power too and blamed it on the fact that he was a republican. The overwhelming majority of Democrats & Republicans in Washington believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and wanted to take action. Another thing you might here people opposed to the war say is, “stop trying to spread democracy!” They might saw that people will do whatever they want, we can’t control their government and military while we have our own to worry about. What they don’t realize is that we have to help other countries like Iraq grow stronger in order to keep terrorism from spreading. Where does selfishness get you in life? No where, and it won’t get the US as a country anywhere either. One very important thing to think about is all of the bloodshed of US forces in Iraq. Some say that the cost was too high, we should’ve never put our soldiers in danger in Iraq. Over 100,000 people died there. I believe that as horrible as that is, more people would have died and would be continuing to die if we hadn’t gone to war when we did.
In 2003, we entered Iraq on the assumption that Sudam Hussein, the dictator if Iraq, was hiding weapons of mass destruction. As devastating as the terrorist attack 9/11 was on the United States, any attack where WMD (weapons of mass destruction) are used would be far worse. A WMD is a nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical or other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans. WMD are used only when someone is trying to completely wipeout the targeted area, therefore WMD are monitored very closely. When the US dropped an atomic bomb on Japan during the Cold War, it kills roughly over 100,000 people. As you might have guessed, WMD are used very rarely. Countries don’t want another country, especially enemies, making additional WMDs. A terrorist group like Al-Qaeda (in Iraq), has only one mission. Their