Liberal View

When I was in junior high, I was really angry with a friend. For anonymity’s sake, let’s call her “Sara”. I called her a “bad name”, and when Sara found out, I was terrified. Sara’s parents took great pleasure in calling other children’s parents to let them know all the evil things their children were doing. Many of my friends were punished after these calls.
Sure enough, my mom received a phone call from Sara’s father that night (the rest of Sara’s family was muted in the background on a second phone). “Mr. Sara” told my mom that I had called Sara the “B-word”. Sara’s parents felt that I needed to be dealt with strictly. They felt that I needed to be grounded, or yelled at – preferably both. Maybe they were hoping for the mouth-washed-out-with-soap treatment. Instead, Mom calmly explained to Mr. Sara that if I had said that, it obviously meant I was frustrated. She told him that she would work with me to find a way to appropriately deal with frustration. Mr. Sara was not happy. You could feel the muted hostility from Sara ’s family on the other phone. Mom said that no other action would be taken against me, and that maybe we girls should be separated so that I could have some breathing room.
You are probably asking yourself, what does this have to do with the war? I believe it has everything to do with the war. It shows that differences in lifestyles have nothing to do with who is wrong and who is right. Who is to say if Mr. Sara or if my mom was right on how I was dealt with? “President Bush led an invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001. Bush has not won supporters for the war, nor has he produced any justification for the sacrifice of Americans and Iraqis” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2005). If Bush had no justification for the war, because we all know the truth about there being no weapons of mass destruction, could it be people who support the war just don’t like the differences in the Iraqis’ beliefs versus their own? Do they believe that anybody that is not like them is evil?
There have been 4,152 recorded U.S. casualties, 30,568 men and woman who are wounded – 20% of those have brain and spinal injuries, and untold numbers of soldiers who have been psychologically injured (Congressional Research Service). Are those numbers worth a war that has no validity? Deaths and injuries to our own people aren’t the only thing that makes this war ridiculous. America spends $12 billion per month in Iraq (NBC’s “Meet the Press” on May 20, 2007). 
We are spending money that we don’t have on something that could end right now. The Iraqi’s don’t like our forces being in their country. They want, have the right to, and have the funds to take control of their country. While their country has a huge surplus of funds, our country has a historically large deficit. President Bush signed a bill in June, 2008, approving about $200 billion more for the year 2008 to be spent on this war, which brings the amount spent close to $800 billion. 
Do I think America should leave Iraq? Yes, I do. We have no justification for this war. Innocent men and woman are dying everyday in the line of duty, thousands upon thousands of our soldiers are wounded, not just physically but also psychologically, and this unnecessary war keeps digging us into a deeper hole of debt. As Barack Obama said in his Senate speech, “I certainly do not oppose all wars, but dumb wars – rash wars. Because there is no decision more profound than the one we make to send our brave men and women into harm’s way.”

Conservative View

“You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964.
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Over the next six years Europe that we knew would be destroyed. Yet, as Hitler’s armies ravaged France, Poland, Russia, and the UK, The United States did very little to aid our allies over the sea. We were isolationists. This is a reoccurring theme for our country and, usually, with good reason. This was a war unlike anyone had ever seen. While our citizens scraped up from the ashes of a massive depression, millions of Jews, Polish, and Slavic people were being systematically exterminated overseas. The Jews call it ‘Shoah’, a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction. We know is as the holocaust.
We all know the end to this story, the triumphant emergence of the world’s two great superpowers, with America eventually mobilizing to save the day. But what if we hadn’t? What if Americans had thrown up their arms and said to ten million Jews ‘We understand how bad things must be for you, but we don’t want to carelessly let our sons go off to war, so to save our own skins we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ This is what was happening. It took an attack on American soil to force us out of our shells. As soon as the problem had become personal everyone finally shouted out the answer that we knew in our hearts all along. It was, and still is, not an easy answer. Finally, six years after the invasion of Poland, the Shoah ended. This was an entirely preventable event, caused simply by taking the things we have for granted.
This piece of history serves as an invaluable lesson to the present. While our enemy is less apparent, and the line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has been blurred. The objective, the fundamentals, and the standard of humanity remain exactly the same. The war in Iraq is not a worthless one. Saddam Hussein put his citizens under living conditions that seem unreal and distant to the typical individual. He has killed thousands of Kurds with nerve agents and other chemicals. Do not believe that just because the Middle East is a different culture, that it is alright for them to be oppressed and slaughtered at the hands of cruel dictators. Our war in Iraq is not lost, nor wasted. Progress is being made, and democracy has been established.  Knowing the past allows us as a country and as a global community to attempt to identify threats before they become a global catastrophe. We cannot permit complacency, isolationism, or fear to allow another Shoah, because this time the result might not be as heroic.
Those who oppose this view would have you labeled as war mongers. They would have you believe that this is a war that cannot be won. They would tell you that Iraq is a losing fight, and that it is causing American bankruptcy. This is not the case, this is defeatism. The answer today is a simple one. Not easy, but simple. As former President Reagan put it, “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”