Moving on In Iraq

I'd like to first admit that this idea is not mine, but I completely agree with it.

A few weeks ago, after the midterm elections were over, I was discussing the war in Iraq with someone, when they brought up their idea for how the war should be handled. They said that the best thing that the U.S. should do now, with the Democrats in control of the House and Senate, is to go up to the UN and ask for help. Bush should get up in front of the U.N. and openly admit that the motives for going to war in Iraq were totally false, and that we screwed up on this one, and ask for other nations to help. The person that I was talking with said that even when he proposed this to die hard conservatives, they couldn't find anything wrong with it.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad released a letter to the American people today urging the U.S. to get out of Iraq and use the funds for the war to fund the poor and needy in our country. He has a point. As a strong advocate of the space program, I frequently receive flak about how the space program uses so much money and that it could be spent on helping the poor and improving life on Earth.

The space program has a $16 billion a year budget. With that they send probes to Mars, launch satellites that we rely on for communication, launch space shuttle missions, and build the International Space Station. The space station, has, and will continue to provide advances in technology that will improve life on Earth.

The war in Iraq has cost the U.S. about $346.3 billion dollars since 2003. See this link for the running total. The war has successfully implanted a democracy in Iraq and overthrown Saddam Hussein. The unfortunate side effects are, that where Iraq was once a secure country, with the only hint of terrorism being Saddam Hussein's regime, there is now a power vacuum where terrorism has been increasing since the war started and in fact created a new front on terror that didn't exist under Saddam. The truth is that most of the problems that our troops face are the direct results of poor planning by our government.

The only way to solve the issues that we face in Iraq is to go before the UN and admit that we made mistakes when we invaded and now, for the sake of global safety, we need help. Just because we're the strongest nation on Earth doesn't mean we can't admit when something has gone wrong and ask for help. That's a lesson that I've learned, but apparently it's something that Bush has failed to learn himself.