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Justifications For War

Justifications for War
My college roommate recently got orders to deploy to Iraq for one to two years. I hope and pray every day that he will make it through without any injury, and just as much I hope he doesn't have to go through the horrible atrocities so commonly associated with war. I know that the odds of his getting injured are very good. The worst part about his deployment is that the reasons for the war are clouded to this day. The Bush Administration's initial arguments for the invasion of Iraq were falsified to create popular support while the real goal was to secure U. S. global hegemony.
The ties between the United States and Iraq have long been a controversial topic. To better understand the entire situation in Iraq we must first understand the relations between Iraq, the U. S., and the United Nations (U. N.) as they pertain to this topic. In August 1990, Iraq, led by President Saddam Hussein, illegally invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Kuwait. The U. N. then moved to take action against this violation of international law. The U. S. and various other U. N. member countries teamed up to make a coalition army and commenced Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait and to push the Iraqi army back within its borders. At the time Iraq was aggressively developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that could be used to decimate large populations. The act in itself was illegal under international law, and the U. N. set into place various resolutions to address this problem.
Scott Ritter, former head of the U. N. Special Commission on Monitoring (UNSCOM) that dealt with weapons inspections in Iraq and a Marine who fought in the Gulf War, wrote a book called Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America.   In this book he states that U. N. Security Council Resolution 678 set forth the legal groundwork for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. A mandate for international intervention with use of force on Iraq...