Political Science

This paper explores the methods in which George W. Bush used his power as the president of the United States of America. Particularly, it sheds light on his decision to attack Iraq, and why that decision could be considered a tyrannical act, as opposed to a democratic decision. Furthermore, it also discusses the implications of the war on terror for American citizens in particular and global politics in general.

There are certain factors that make the Iraq war, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, an act that cannot be called a truly democratic act. One major problem that was evident even before the war started was that people of the United States of America were not given a choice. They were shown a fallacious argument that we either go to the war or do not go to war. No third option was given to the American public. Being the President of the nation entails that public, specifically the congress, is given complete information before making decisions, however this was not done so.

It was in the power of the President to take all stakeholders in confidence prior to the war, but now we have evidences that he did not take this into consideration and willfully kept them in the dark about certain aspects of the war. For example, the stated goal of the war in Iraq was to destroy or secure the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Iraqi regime allegedly had. However, today we see that the WMD theory was based upon either false intelligence, or shoddy information gathering.

At the start of the war, the president failed to mention that this theory of WMD cannot be 100 relied upon and may not be entirely true. Instead of telling the American public about this, he claimed that this theory is definitely true to such an extent that we can go to a full scale war based upon this. Thus, the President used his power to misguide the citizens of the nation to go to war under false pretenses, which is a purely tyrannical act under the guise of democracy.

Furthermore, the decision to go to war was never discussed in a way that would open the doors to any other method of solving the problems of Iraq (Allawi, 2007). What this means is that the President never discussed the possibility that Iraqs problems can be solved by bilateral or trilateral talks with the help of the United Nations or any other nation. It is a fact that Iraqi regime was willing to talk and discuss the issues till the end and France had even offered to mediate the talks, but this option was never shown to be feasible to the American public, and the only possibility was that U.S goes to war or Iraqi regime would attack the U.S soil with WMDs, which has proved to be false in hindsight. Hence we can say that it was a tyrannical decision for the president to go to war under such circumstances.