Because there were never any weapons of mass destruction.

Pre-war intelligence on Iraq was flawed. Human intelligence sources provided by the Iraq National Congress (a group of Iraqi defectors) provided information that was used in the lead up to war in spite of internal dissent within the Intelligence Community and suspicions that these sources were fabricating their information. There have been accusations that pressure was place on intelligence gathering agencies by the Administration and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) in order to shape information to support a case for war. In the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s review of the statements made by the Administration in the lead up to war, Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV) wrote:

As the report details, Administration statements prior to the war often reflected the reporting of the Intelligence Community, even when the judgments underlying the reporting were based on flawed analysis or false information.  However, senior Administration officials repeatedly spoke in declarative and unequivocal terms about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and support for terrorists.  These declarative statements were not substantiated.  In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq, Administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq, and the threat it represented to our national security.

The minority on the committee has made statements acknowledging that pre-war intelligence was flawed, but denying that any pressure was placed on the Intelligence Community by the Administration or OSP, and stating that the Administration worked with the only intelligence it had available…however bad that intelligence may have been.

While the issue of who knew what and how that information was gained remains highly politicized the post-war findings in Iraq are irrefutable. From the findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

• Iraq’s nuclear program ended in 1991 and their ability to construct a weapon progressively declined from that point on. There had been no effort to restart the program.
• Iraq conducted no production or research on biological weapons after 1996.
• There were no stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq. Some pre-1991 era munitions capable of carrying chemical weapons have been found. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever resumed chemical weapon production after 1991. Iraq did not have the capacity to produce nerve gas.

Because the war costs us hundreds of millions of dollars a day.

The Congressional Research Service reported in October of 2008 that the cost of the war in Iraq to date has been $657 billion. This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars each day and cumulative cost of more than $2100 dollars for each of the 303,500,000 citizens of the United States.

Because over 4200 Americans have lost their lives, and over 100,000 have been wounded.

The Department of Defense reported 4,224 American deaths during Operation Iraqi Freedom as of January 11, 2009.

The figures for those wounded in action are more than 30,000 through September 2008. However, the figures provided by the Department of Defense are misleading. In October 2006 an independent non-governmental research institute, The National Security Archives, tried to obtain figures for the number of disability claims by veterans of the war in Iraq and was told that “no documents existed.” The Veteran’s Benefits Administration finally released figures (after the threat of a lawsuit by the National Security Archives) that show more than 150,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed a disability claim (that’s more than one in four).

A portion of these are related to wounds for which no service member receives a Purple Heart and for which there is no accounting by the Department of Defense. The psychological impact of this war is difficult to quantify and the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be debilitating…affecting a veteran’s ability to function in life after their release from active duty.

Because hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed…

The Lancet Study on Iraqi Mortality published by John’s Hopkins University in October 2006 used statistical methods to estimate that more than 650,000 Iraqis (2.5% of their total population) had been killed as a result of the invasion. Criticism of the Lancet study says the statistical methods used overestimate the total number of deaths.

The Iraq Body Count Project (IBC) puts the current number of Iraqi civilian dead at between 90,000 and 98,000. As stated on their website, “data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents. “ IBC records only the deaths of Iraqi civilians (not police, military, or insurgents) whose deaths have been documented by media or official agencies. There is criticism of the IBC because of western media bias and the under-reporting of deaths (the Lancet Study suggested that passive surveillance accounts for less than 20% of the actual deaths in conflict situations…with some instances of fewer than 5% of deaths being reported in the manner necessary for groups like the Iraq Body Count).

While the actual number of Iraqi dead as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom will never be known, it probably lies somewhere between these two figures.

…and with each unjust death, new insurgents are born.

Numbers cannot fully convey the meaning behind the casualty figures for Iraq. Using the range provided above (90,000 – 650,000) you arrive at .3% to 2.5% of the population of Iraq dead as a result of the invasion. Applying this to the population of the United Sates would give a range from 910,000 to more than 7,000,000 dead. Imagine if a foreign nation came here in the name of promoting democracy and killed seven million Americans. Would you believe they were acting in your best interest? What would you do? Would you collaborate…or would you resist?

Because occupying Iraq doesn’t make us any safer at home.

The National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006 states, “We asses that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives” and “the Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause célèbre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War is counting on you,

End the war now!