Iraq War, 2003, by Elisabeth Shoop

From MemoryArchive

Who: Elisabeth Shoop
What: The War in Iraq, or How I Became a Democrat
When: 2003
Where: Leesburg, Florida

I must admit I was caught up in the hype of the Iraq war in 2003. When it first started, I collected copies of The Orlando Sentinel, because they had large maps of Iraq in them. I had put one on a bulletin board, and was tracking the troop movements. At the time, being 17 years old, I thought it was pretty neat. I was taking an International Relations course at Lake-Sumter Community College at the time, and my professor was very much for the war, so I was too. He said we should have invaded years before we actually did. He explained it to us using terms like “Realism” and “Jus ad Bellum” and I believed we were doing a good thing.

However, my mind began to change when we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in the desert sands of Iraq. Then I listened to the opposition, and they started to make a lot more sense. Sure, Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but he was the leader of a sovereign state. When it was revealed that the CIA intelligence that led us into the war was bad information, then I started getting angry, and fully came out against the war. The invasion of Iraq was how I became a democrat.