This is a question for all who are anti-war.?

Personally, I don't think every argument, or disagreement, needs to be settled by war and think this country has tried to settle disagreements by other means. However, when there is no apparent solution and innocent lives are being lost, there is only one answer. I was horrified to awaken to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. I could not imagine who would do such a thing, and I still can't. Now, after a few years of fighting and too many deaths, we are still fighting in Iraq and elsewhere with an enemy unseen and unidentified.Though it is sickening, I believe it is necessary until we can develop a new strategy for dealing with this enemy. Is this the best strategy? Who knows. But can we declare a 'time-out' while we devise a better solution. If so, who do we declare it to and do we trust their word? I don't think so. I think the war in Iraq has them occupied for the moment and we must use this time to develop new strategies, new weapons, and new technologies for convincing these people, and any others harboring such ideas, that these tactics can and will not succeed, and must not continue. If not Iraq, where? The streets of New York City, or Los Angeles? I haven't heard a solution that makes any sense to me yet. For all their criticism of present policy and strategy from the current herd of 'wannabe's, I hear no words of wisdom poring forth from this collection of 'geniuses'. The only thing I have seen or heard that has been effective so far is current strategy. Fast enough? Certainly NOT! But effective, YES, for now at least. We need less complaining and more commiseration to deal with this mess.

joshbl74 is correct about this war being a fight that was picked to show America's strength and resolve. Iraq made a very easy choice. and there were plenty of justifications for going to war with them. There was human rights violation, the broken UN sanctions, the breached cease fire agreement, the 1998 Iraq regime change doctrine. I don't think Bush thought it would be as hard a sell as it was. But it was the WMD's in the hands of a state sponsor of terrorism that got people's attention, so that's what he sold it on. And it turned out to be the one thing he couldn't prove, though everyone believed it to be true before the invasion. The invasion went pretty smooth, maybe too smooth. Where things got screwed up whether deliberately or not was an unwillingness to take on the task of nation-building. By trying to side step and short-cut this process the door was opened for insurgency and sectarian violence. They tried to force a new government on from the top down rather than building it from the ground up. A critical mistake that is very difficult to fix. Had this war been properly executed it could have ended by now, so it is understandable that people grow weary of it. But I still understand the reasons that necessitated its beginning. And I understand that failure is not an option. Though even a success will not be a gain so much as preventing a loss that would be unbearable. It is a mess.

Bush was profoundly affected by 9/11, he really feels deeply the idea of "not on my watch", but it was his watch and he wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. He felt that no one in the world would never have tried this crap during the cold war. It had been too long since the US flexed its muscles and all the fringe groups that hate us had forgotten what "most powerful nation on earth" means.

Invading Afganistan was a no-brainer but didn't prove anything to anyone. The real horror there came from a video of Osama admitting to his buddies that he planned 9/11. In the video he was asked if he was afraid of the US going to Afganistan. He said that ofcourse they will come but he needs only to kill a few of thier precious rangers (aka somolia) and they will run home crying.

Bush was mortified. We were no longer feared. The entire point of a military is to discourage attack. You use it every now and then to remind people its there but it is primarily a deterant. Bush needed to scare these guys. All of them. To do that he needed to pick a fight. Win the fight. And take "significant losses" in the process. He had to show that we would come for you if you wronged us and that we would not run from a few losses. Afganistan had not made this point. He was sure it had to be bigger. So - the Axis of Evil. These are the top three bad guys. Powerful militaries by world standards and anti US governments.

North Korea has nukes and no strategic value. You can let them rot and they will not do too much damage to you. Keep up the pressure by sending them the message along with everyone else.

Iran has a growing internal reform movement and could actually fix itself (or so it looked in the 01-02 timeframe).

Iraq...Bingo. Powerful military even after the sanctions. Big pile of violated UN resolutions. Really ugly history. And Saddam had recently stated that he was willing to use oil as a weapon against the US. He had asked OPEC to force prices higher to squeeze the US economy.

Bush used the WMD story to take us to war. It's what everyone wanted to hear. Could have handled that better but really its not how we got there but rather was the war the right way to go at the time. Not sure. I'm not President. I do know that the "poor exicution of the war" was kinda on purpose. We needed to loose lives to prove the point. Now that is a hard call as commander in chief.

I hate to ponder at what point you say that the loses were enough. And then how would we leave this mess with anything called a victory.

You may not like that answers you are getting but I will tell you that Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9-11. Afghanistan, was the country responsible for the attacks on our country and we went in there and started bombing. And rightly so. I don't have a problem with us going in there and trying to find Bin-Laden. He was there and we went looking for him.

My problem is with the fact that the American public was lied to about W.M.D. being in Iraq. We all believed President Bush and we all agreed that we needed to invade Iraq, just to keep the world safe. Funny thing though, when we got there, there were no WMD and there never were any. Now whether it was bad information or just an out and out lie, does not matter. I do find it interesting that Daddy Bush went in to Iraq but did not finish the job so his son found a reason to INVADE the country under false allegations.

To answer your question though, I am tired of our American soldiers dieing needlessly in a country that we should have never invaded for false pretenses, but I also know that now we have to stay until the country can stand on it's own two feet. We cannot just leave the country now because we have made a mess over there and now we have to fix it. The sensless loss of life has now become irrelivent.

Another interesting fact, if you care to know, is thgat Bin-Laden in now hiding in Pakistan and we will not invade that country because they are our "friends".

The people who did that to us are still out there. We didn't get them, and Bush has actually said at one point that Bin Ladin was irrelevant.

BIn Ladin was in Afghanistan, and Pakistan on the border there, where he is still assumed to be in hiding.

He was never in Iraq, had nothing to do with Saddam, and we turned our attention from an honorable goal of getting the man who harmed us and going after a man who, while admittedly a repulsive dictator had nothing to do with our objective. I hate incompetence, and thats what leaving without getting BIn Ladin was. Now, after bombing the hell out of Iraq, and destabilizing its shabby government and inducing a civil, sectarian war, we have lost more Americans in that sandbox than were killed in 9/11 and the perpetrator of that crime is still right where is was before all that money and all those troops were lost.

Lets just say we won the war, Saddam is dead, they have elected a government twice now, lets come home and let them fight it out as they have been doing for the last six hundred years.

First off, when did Iraq attack the USA? None of the hijackers responsible for the tragedy of 9/11 was Iraqi. Not one. They never threatened the USA or attacked the USA. Saddam was a sworn enemy of Bin Laden and there was much hatred between the two. Not all the people killed that day were American. If memory serves me correctly, there were people from 81 countries working in that center. The hijackers were Saudi, Egyptian and I think Algerian. Bush capitalized on our fear after this, blatantly lied to the people to get his war going. He wanted this war from his first day in office. Attacking Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or seeking terrorists.

Since that war, companies that have defense contracts, with no bids by the way, have become rich. Halliburton has an 800% increase in profits since the start of it.

This war was not about preserving our freedoms or freeing us from terrorist activities. That has pretty much remained forgotten by this President. So much corrupt activity is associated with this war and profit by people close to Bush. He does not care what the people want, he has his own agenda and it has made us the most hated nation on earth second only to Nazi Germany.

I disagree with our reasons for going there, our reasons for staying there. These guys there deserve far better than this from this country. They need to be out of the Bush meatgrinder. A river of blood has run thru Iraq and far more terrorists have been made by this action than have been caught by it. Bin Laden remains forgotten by Bush it seems.

Have you ever stopped to think what would happen if the USA was invaded and our military is tied up in Iraq? Who exactly would defend us? Who is going to pay for this war, financed by the Chinese? If the 9/11 tragedy can do the damage it did to this country, what would happen if a full scale invasion happened and Bush has gutted our military for his misadventure in Iraq based on blatant lies?

All these are my reasons. America needs to stop and think and to put AMERICA first and our defense. These guys need to come home and Bush needs impeachment.

He reeks of incompetence and corruption.

I am anti-war when the war being fought has no foundation in protecting our homeland or to save innocent people. That is definitely the case in Iraq. The people responsible for 9-11 were not even from Iraq or Afghanistan. If we truly wanted revenge for their actions, why didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? You cannot bomb entire countries for what a few terrorists do. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a cruel and evil dictator - but certainly not the only one in the world. You don't see us taking on half the population of Africa to save them from their corrupt leaders. Our actions have served to increase Al Queda's strength and to destabilize the entire mid-east. Iran is chomping at the bit to move in to Iraq when we leave. How has that helped promote Democracy and freedom?

What I do believe in is supporting our troops once they have been sent in to battle. It is not the fault of our servicemen and women that our leaders have made bad choices. They deserve to be treated with respect and dignity for their sacrifices.

We were correct in our actions in Afganistan.

I did not agree with the invasion of Iraq. I thought at the time that the justification was highly suspect and alarmist and the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction vindicated that thought. Now I completely believe that the stated justification was a outright lie and I am insulted that my government thinks so little of its citizens that it would lie to them on such a grand scale. I believe destabilizing a substantial portion of the Middle East was a reckless tactic for any reason. I can see a certain logic to it but its an unethical logic that I believe shames us as a nation. I am alarmed by the number of citizens who have abandoned every pretense of civility given the smallest excuse. We have citizens who fully support torture of any kind, execution without trial, imprisonment with out charges, the suspension of civil rights, and the abandonment of every principal of the constitution.

This is where our policies have brought us. I do not merely object to the war. I object to the course our country seems to have set for itself. I am a student of history and I have seen this course in other countries. It always ended in the destruction of the country and I love the United States and don't want to see it die.

I totally and utterly and completely disagree with the war in Iraq, and have from the very day that Bush started talking about it. There were no WMDs. Al Quaeda, the group who attacked us on 9/11, was not there. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. And we were not even done doing our job in Afghanistan, going after the terrorists that attacked and killed our people. We STILL haven't finished that job. So what are we doing in Iraq? Sure, there are terrorists there NOW, but they were not there until AFTER we attacked. Sounds to me like we CAUSED the very thing we were supposedly fighting! So in my mind, thousands of our soldiers, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, have died for no reason. Billions of dollars that could have gone to help those in need or to defend us from terrorists has been thrown away. Bush lied about it from the beginning, and millions of liberals and moderates and experts recognized this. Dozens of books were written. Hundreds of experts on the Middle East, war, terror, and politics spoke out against it. People just refused to listen. They were blinded by 9/11 and the fearmongering that Bush was selling. There are more people like me than you appear to be aware of. We are not tired of the war. We never supported it to begin with.

I agree we are all getting tired of it. Since Bush has been in office you never really hear what's going on w/ our troops anymore all you hear about is the ones who got killed.... well why were they killed? I see it as Bush just has them over there sitting on fuel and oil Bush is greedy and doesn't care about his nation! I'm sorry but I like knowing whats going on and what "could" happen tomorrow

I agree sometimes we need a war but they have been over there since 2001 and they are just dragging more over I don't see the need in it. these soldiers have families and a life. Fighting for your country is one thing but living your whole life to so call "protect" is rediciulous!!!