I remember the day well, almost like it was last week, March 20, 2003 the day the Coalition of “the willing” lead by the United States invaded Iraq. I remember it so well because I had a twenty dollar bet with my friend Jed that Iraq would be invaded before our spring break was over. Thanks to Saddam Hussein’s stubbornness and what seemed like an insatiable need for an invasion by President Bush I won the bet, but now as well as then I would have gladly coughed up twenty bucks to have kept us out of the quagmire and foreign policy debacle that is Iraq.
I have always held the belief that there is no just cause for war except for when a nation is directly attacked by another nation (i.e.… Pearl Harbor and WWII). In the case of this Iraq war not only had Iraq never directly attacked America, it didn’t even have the capability to attack us. Even if Iraq did have the weapons of mass destruction that the administration so earnestly claimed they had, the missiles that would have been used to deliver the non existent payloads didn’t even have a long enough range to reach Europe, much less the United States. Another one of the justifications that had been given was that Iraq had links to Al-Qaeda, the group that actually had attacked us and still does pose an imminent threat to our nation’s security. I didn’t think it was true at the time mostly because of the lack of evidence there was, and as it turns out I was right not to believe since there was never any link discovered. So this meant to me that even if all of the justifications that were given before the war turned out to be true, that it still would have been wrong to attack because not only had Iraq never attacked us, it had never even been even been able to pose as a threat against us.
Another problem that I had with the war when it had just begun was the legality of the whole thing, under international and United States law. The war was never authorized by any international governing body, and though there was a United Nations resolution (1441) that resumed weapons inspection and promised “serious consequences” if Saddam did not comply, a latter resolution that would have authorized the use of force was proposed but was never voted on because it faced a veto from Russia and France.