America Out of Iraq Now - Essay Example

The Iraq invasion was a mistake from the very beginning, and now the cost of this war is more than we can bear.More than two thousand American troops have died in this unjustifiable war, which is bad enough, but between thirty-five and forty thousand Iraqi civilians are dead due to U.S.-led military activity in their country (Iraq Body Count). Reservists and National Guardsmen are being sent to Iraq because we are running out of regular military troops to send, but National Guardsmen are more useful to us at home.

There should have been more National Guardsmen to help Americans through New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Instead, they were in Iraq. Our presence in Iraq is killing thousands of people and it is depriving Americans of their loved ones and the social support that military personnel stationed on American soil can provide to their country.We can't afford the body count, and we can't afford the financial price tag either. This war is costing our nation money we don't have, more than a thousand dollars every second (Matsakis & Vlanton, 2006) and if it doesn't end soon, it could end up costing a trillion dollars!

At the same time, money is being cut from the budget for more important work, such as scientific research. Since we already have a crisis in Social Security, inadequate funding for public schools, and an epidemic of uninsured Americans, along with homelessness, unemployment, and every other social problem we had before the invasion, it is really irresponsible for the government to commit to a lengthy and costly war. Not only are we spending billions of dollars to blow things up, but we're also going to have to spend billions of more dollars to rebuild all the things we've destroyed.

This is a really stupid use of resources. America is not yet a perfect country. Although we claim to have a democratic government, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and irregular voting compromise this. Who are we to judge other nations It is not our responsibility to conduct regime change anywhere besides our own country. We just don't have the authority to go around telling other countries that their governments are wrong when our own government is constantly involved in scandals.

If our human-rights record is better than other countries', it is probably because the CIA is good at hiding their abuses. As the events at the Abu Graib prison, for example, demonstrate, Americans can be just as cruel as people of any nationality or ethnicity. All we are doing in Iraq is proving to the rest of the world that the myth of the ugly American is true. Americans have come to understand that the president lied to them, and more and more people want this war to end right away. The American government must find a way to withdraw its troops and let Iraq and the United Nations rebuild the nation according to what is best for Iraqis, not what Americans want.