The eight-year occupation of United States troops in Iraq was an overall unjustified, unacceptable war that absorbed military resources, wasted government money, threw away thousands of lives and threw a nation into chaos. Defending the Iraq War is next to impossible, due the questionable reasons for entering the conflict and the moral ambiguity of the affair.

The Iraq War lacks justifiability first because the United States is unset in its reason for entering the conflict in the first place. The public, patriotic claim was that the U.S. went to war with Iraq in an attempt to free civilians of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive, tyrannical regime. While the dictatorship was severely oppressive, it is not the only oppressive dictatorship in the world. If the U.S. was going to war with Iraq because of a moral obligation to rid the world of harmful tyranny, it would also have to go to war with every other African, Middle-Eastern, Asian and South American nation with an oppressive regime (which it hasn’t).

The government also used fear in the aftermath of 9/11 to support the war, claiming the war would be an act of self-defense against future terrorism by the Iraqi nation. Without any certain evidence that an attack, or even an idea of an attack, existed in Iraq’s government plans, this is an ill-conceived statement simply meant to incite fear and support.

This means the Iraq War was unjustified in its inception, and it continued to be unjustified for the next eight years. Even after Saddam Hussein was tried and killed in 2006 (thereby ending the ‘reign of evil’ in Iraq) United States troops continued to occupy and fight in Iraq for five more years. The reason for this was perpetuated as a need to protect the native population from terrorism – the same kind of terrorism that was happening unchecked in countries all over the world.

Furthermore, U.S. occupation and war in Iraq aided the country very little, despite the U.S. desire to ‘free’ the Iraqi people. Eight years later, the country is still riddled with terrorism and elections are haunted by corruption. The country is just as violent, chaotic and unstable as it was eight years ago.

When the U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq, there was no direct threat to the United States from the country and no moral obligation distinguishing Iraq, which could have applied to half the other countries in the world. In the end, there were also no overreaching benefits from the U.S. occupation at all. The entire war was absolutely unjustified, from beginning to end.