Iraq War Argument Excersise 1.1.3 by Patrick Gurley

    

I am here today to right about an argument exercise 1.1.3 on page thirty of our textbook. The argument is that there was never any imminent threat from the Iraqi government, therefore we never should've invaded Iraq. I am not one to usually argue politics, but I have a very strong position on this subject that is made all too often on television today. First off, I believe that it was perfectly justifiable to invade Iraq because there indeed was an global threat from Saddam Hussein and his radical Islamic terrorist regime. He was killing thousands of innocent civilians and was destroying every chance that the Iraqi government had of becoming an independent democracy. If this was not an ethical issue on a global scale, I don't know what is. Many people seem to make the argument that since there were no weapons of mass destruction found once we had invaded Iraq, that automatically there was no point for us to be there. First of all there is no evidence to support the idea that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, so the only way to insure that there wasn't a threat was to go in and investigate in the first place. Secondly the definition of the word "threat" has to be defined. The word threat is defined in the dictionary as "a declaration of an intention or determination to inflict punishment, injury on a person or a group of people. The Iraqi government under Saddam had made many moves to both buy nuclear supplies and biological weapons from both Iran and Russia and willingly use them against people he saw as a threat. He was already using mustard gas on innocent Iraqi civilians. The threat of nuclear weapons, alone, is enough to at least militarily investigate the situation. Investigating the situation with ground troops is way better than ignoring the threat and doing nothing.

             The Iraq war situation brings up the ethical issue of subjective relativism. Subjective relativism states that moral standards are not objective, but are relative to what cultures or persons believe. If this is the case with Saddam Hussein, then by definition, if he believed that slaughtering thousands of Iraqi people in order to assert his power and using nuclear weapons against other global populations was right, and he believed this to be morally acceptable then he would be deemed right by definition of subjective relativism. We know from  statements of Saddam Hussein and his followers that they truly believe that what they did was morally right. Now, I know that most people will agree with me that that is extremely false. It goes against everything we believe to be right, Just because someone thinks stealing is ok, that doesn't mean they can go steal something and it be morally right. Life doesn't work that way. Just because we hear, on the news, that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, that doesn't mean that we as a people are being told the whole story. There are thousands of operations and findings that the government keeps hidden from us for the sake of our own protection, so why should the Iraq invasion be any different. There are countless accounts from former military generals and Special Forces commanders in the United States military stating that the people of the United States don't need to know what we found in Iraq. The fact that they would make a statement like that makes me happy to know that the threat of Saddam and his regime had been eliminated. I wouldn't want to know all the details of what we found there. It would disturb me greatly. In the end the fall of his regime had saved countless American and Iraqi lives. However if we had not intervened, who knows what devastation would have unfolded. Situations with radical leaders and terrorist groups cannot be taken lightly. Radical threats are even worse today with the Taliban and ISIS terrorist groups. The same situation applies here as with Saddam Hussein. We cannot ignore these radical groups! Action must be taken to eliminate the threat and save thousands of innocent lives around the world.