GLOBAL VIEW: Observations on Iraq War
By Lianne Li
According to our WOW survey, only 7 percent of the 690 students involved had been able to say that the Iraq war was justified compared to an overwhelming 85 percent that said the war was not justified. The results were totally predictable, given the massive anti-war attitude among most of the students.
“Were there enough reasons for the US to invade a sovereign state like Iraq?” an anonymous student posted on one of the politics studies forums. “If there were, then the UN had the right to take military actions against Iraq for breaking international laws as it did when Iraq invaded Kuwait. But America launched the war, violating international law and the sovereignty of Iraq.”
At the cost of 1,246 coalition deaths--observed before October 22, 2004--and over 150 billion US dollars spent on the war, not to mention the great loss for the Iraqi people, the Iraq war seemed to end up nowhere, despite the fact that the goal of the Bush administration before war to overthrow the Saddam regime and reconstruct Iraq’s political system had apparently been reached. Whether the Iraqi people would appreciate the effort of the US to build another government for them by force against the pleas for a peaceful settlement by the international community remains a large question.
But the aim to destroy terrorism by war seemed wrong to most in the first place. “Saddam Hussein so dominated the Iraqi regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.” As observed in the report by Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer, who found no WMD in Iraq after the war.
Was the US government misled by their intelligence organization? Why haven’t any convincing clues of Saddam administration secretly developing WMD been found? Why did the Bush administration still resort to war even with several warnings from CIA director Tenet that something was wrong with the intelligence?
It seemed that the war was also launched on the basis of a suspicion of Saddam’s possible connection to terrorism, but again no clue of this was found. The war did not destroy terrorist forces as it was supposed to. Instead it provided terrorists with the nationalist hatred they needed, invigorating them to a wide range of attacks, such as the March 11 explosion in Spain, and the March 17 car bombing of a hotel in Baghdad, and the recent kidnapping of Chinese engineers in Pakistan.
As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said during a recent interview on ITV television’s Dimbleby program, the Iraq war has done little to increase security across the world or halt the activities of international terrorists.
Besides the doubtful purpose and result of the war, other negative aspects of it were by no means negligible. The abuse of Iraqi detainees brought not only humiliation to the Iraqi people, but also notoriety to US troops around the world. Without UN permission in the first place, the marching of coalition troops led by the US into Iraq had been called a foreign invasion, and the effect of the abuse only highlighted that image. Despite the sentence of imprisonment of some of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib Prison case, the negative image could not easily be wiped out.
Given these negative points of the Iraq war, it was therefore easy to see why it appeared to be unjust to most students. But after all, as some implied, all wars are evil.
According to our WOW survey, only 7 percent of the 690 students involved had been able to say that the Iraq war was justified compared to an overwhelming 85 percent that said the war was not justified. The results were totally predictable, given the massive anti-war attitude among most of the students.
“Were there enough reasons for the US to invade a sovereign state like Iraq?” an anonymous student posted on one of the politics studies forums. “If there were, then the UN had the right to take military actions against Iraq for breaking international laws as it did when Iraq invaded Kuwait. But America launched the war, violating international law and the sovereignty of Iraq.”
At the cost of 1,246 coalition deaths--observed before October 22, 2004--and over 150 billion US dollars spent on the war, not to mention the great loss for the Iraqi people, the Iraq war seemed to end up nowhere, despite the fact that the goal of the Bush administration before war to overthrow the Saddam regime and reconstruct Iraq’s political system had apparently been reached. Whether the Iraqi people would appreciate the effort of the US to build another government for them by force against the pleas for a peaceful settlement by the international community remains a large question.
But the aim to destroy terrorism by war seemed wrong to most in the first place. “Saddam Hussein so dominated the Iraqi regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.” As observed in the report by Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer, who found no WMD in Iraq after the war.
Was the US government misled by their intelligence organization? Why haven’t any convincing clues of Saddam administration secretly developing WMD been found? Why did the Bush administration still resort to war even with several warnings from CIA director Tenet that something was wrong with the intelligence?
It seemed that the war was also launched on the basis of a suspicion of Saddam’s possible connection to terrorism, but again no clue of this was found. The war did not destroy terrorist forces as it was supposed to. Instead it provided terrorists with the nationalist hatred they needed, invigorating them to a wide range of attacks, such as the March 11 explosion in Spain, and the March 17 car bombing of a hotel in Baghdad, and the recent kidnapping of Chinese engineers in Pakistan.
As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said during a recent interview on ITV television’s Dimbleby program, the Iraq war has done little to increase security across the world or halt the activities of international terrorists.
Besides the doubtful purpose and result of the war, other negative aspects of it were by no means negligible. The abuse of Iraqi detainees brought not only humiliation to the Iraqi people, but also notoriety to US troops around the world. Without UN permission in the first place, the marching of coalition troops led by the US into Iraq had been called a foreign invasion, and the effect of the abuse only highlighted that image. Despite the sentence of imprisonment of some of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib Prison case, the negative image could not easily be wiped out.
Given these negative points of the Iraq war, it was therefore easy to see why it appeared to be unjust to most students. But after all, as some implied, all wars are evil.
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