Every day, when I go home, I turn on the television, and what is the first thing I see? The war in Iraq plastered on every channel.
The evening news segments make me wonder if war is really the best answer.

For the last few months this question has been on the mind of many Americans, just like me, who are torn between war and dictatorship. On the one hand, we have this evil dictator, Saddam Hussein, who rules with an iron fist and should be removed from power. On the other hand, we have millions of innocent lives that will be affected, including those of Americans, if we go to war.

As Bob Dylan once wrote “Trying to make some sense of it all, but I see it makes no sense at all.”

But where do we look for answers, our leaders? Every time you see the president, he has his hand on the phone ready to make the call to deploy troops. Do we look towards the television networks? Is it not the duty of our leaders to provide their people with some kind of direction?

No one seems to have the answers that we are looking for. It is truly is a shame that Bush’s critics in Congress do not use their voices as loud as possible in a time when criticism should be at a high.

The United States is supposed to protect Americans from tyranny at home and abroad, but what is our conquest in this mission?

I agree that Hussein is a vicious killer, but what happens if he is still in control after we bomb Iraq? Then, what did that accomplish? Is it worth the $100 billion price tag to fight this man? There is no way that they can defeat our Army. We will destroy them, as we did last time. But we are still in the same spot that we were back in 1991.

Bottom line is that the only way this problem will be resolved is if Hussein is taken out of power, but he does not care if we turn Baghdad into a dartboard for missiles as long as he is still in power. That’s all he cares about.

How do we expect to pay for it? The cost alone should raise an eyebrow for every American. It was not that long ago that the administration was calling the $25 billion price tag ridiculous. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last week that a war would not cost $25 billion, but $100 billion.

To answer his critics, Bush has called for a cut in taxes to stimulate the economy, but it just does not make any sense. The new plan calls for a stop on taxing stock dividends. His new plan would call for a $670 million tax cut. How is this possible?

How can we spend more money on the war than we have coming in? Bush’s budget did not call for one penny to be spent on war. This should be a time when we should be raising taxes to pay for the war and cutting the fat from some of the programs that are not being run at a successful rate.

America is starting to look like a bully. Although many countries in the United Nations said to wait, we almost refused, wanting to look like the tough guys. Well, where has that gotten us?

We have France and Russia up in arms and threatening to veto any action that we plan to take. France has decided to take a stand against us, as if we were the enemy. It almost sickens me to watch the French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, make us look like fools, when no more than six months ago he wanted to be our best friend.

But he must not remember that on their coast there are thousands of American soldiers buried who lost their lives in World War II recapturing France from Hitler. If those brave men had not done what they did, the official language of France could be German.

Iraq has now started to destroy missiles it once said it never had, so what do we do? Do we trust Iraq and bring back the thousands of boys in Turkey and along the Iraqi borders, or do we just leave them there waiting for the next thing to happen?

The Bush administration is hell bent on war, which will soon happen. Most political analysts already predict that Bush will by-pass the U.N. and will claim Iraq had breached U.N. resolution 1441 and send in the troops.

After that the only thing we can do is pray for the troops to come home safe from what is a very dangerous environment.