“The streets of Baghdad are often awash with blood, littered with debris and scattered body parts,” said The New York Times’ Joao Silva in a blog on March 21, 2008 in Iraq. “Human lives are scarred for eternity due to the cowardly acts of those who mostly attack soft targets.” Do you remember when this chaos started? I remember Sept. 11 clearly, as if it were a few days ago. I was home from school, sick on the couch watching TV when suddenly my show stopped and turned to the news showing the twin towers being hit. I, too, like other Americans, wanted to stop terrorism. However, this war was not what I wanted or expected. Bush keeps saying that this war has made the world a safer place. Where is the safety when all I see and hear on the news is that more people have died because of the war?

According to an Arab newspaper, Al Jazeera, we have sent more than 160,000 young men and women to Iraq. We keep sending these young soldiers to the war though we have not seen any success stories after the capture and hanging of Saddam Hussein. Who are we looking for in Iraq? We are still searching for Bin Laden, but he is not in Iraq, so why are we tearing up the United States and Iraq?

According to the newspaper, South Florida’s Sun Sentinel, almost 4,000 U.S soldiers died, and more than 29,000 have been wounded. According to Al Jazeera, there have been tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. The World Health Organization said to Al Jazeera that there have been 104,000 to 223,000 deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.

The Bush administration has brainwashed us into dehumanizing Iraqis to gain approval to continue the war. According to BBC, Bush said in his recent speech, “The terrorists who murder the innocent in the streets of Baghdad want to murder the innocent in the streets of American cities.” Look at us! We have soldiers killing innocent people in Baghdad streets, and I do not see us taking responsibility for our murders.

How is the Bush administration able to fund the war with $5 billion, which rises continuously? According to BBC, “Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war will cost $3 trillion, once health care for veterans and future economic losses are considered.”

The administration has forgotten about our current problems in the United States. Our public schools need a great deal of attention, and there is still poverty that we need to work on. These problems need to be fixed instead of sending our money off to a war where we do not have a goal or any success.

When are the men and women who put their lives on the line going to be able to return home? According to South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Bush administration will not send any more soldiers home because Bush believes retreating would cause chaos in Iraq, Al-Queda would attack America, and Iran would develop nuclear weapons.

The administration quickly jumps to conclusions to get America’s approval to continue the war. For example, on March 19, 2003, Bush declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which later turned out to be false.

The Bush administration does not care about how people vote or their opinions on this war. On March 19, 2008, ABC News told Cheney that two-thirds of Americans said they disagreed with the war, and Cheney replied, “So? I think you cannot be blown off course by the future in the public opinion polls.”

We all know that we are living in bad times when we cannot trust out government and their decision on war. We need to send our troops home, so we can allow the United States to fix our relations with other countries, work on our country’s problems, and allow Iraqis to recover from our destruction of their country.