The fact that Bush still has a 30% approval rating suggests that either a third of this country is illiterate or as gullible as an eight year old; or perhaps a combination of both. This is considering his response to 9/11 (the War in Iraq) and the way he went about doing it; not to mention the whole Katrina incident.

It is obvious to everyone that Al-Qaeda was the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks; that much is a fact. However, President Bush gave Americans the false impression that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were related. He even went as far as saying that an Al-Qaeda network was being trained and armed by Saddam in Iraq. This belief went against the information that the White House was given from the CIA and European terrorist investigation teams, who found no link between the two. After all, Saddam’s Iraq represented the form of secular government that would have been a target to Al-Qaeda, and Saddam would have seen Al-Qaeda as a threat to his ruling. Bottom line is that Iraq and Al-Qaeda HATED each other.

However, the misconceptions don’t stop there. As if linking a terrorist group with Iraq didn’t gain enough support for a war that President Bush has been interested in since he took office, he also told American people that he believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Keep in mind that this report (which once again turned out to be false) along with the Al-Qaeda/Iraq link was announced at a time when the country was feeling “overly patriotic” after 9/11. Majority of Americans wanted to go to war with somebody, they just didn’t know who, and once the Commander in Chief pointed the finger at Iraq, most angered Americans bought into the lies and supported the decision at the time. However, only 16% of Americans still believe that story.

Once President Bush got the approval of Congress to go to war, he assured all Americans that it would take place under the most carefully thought out plans. However, when General Eric Shinseki, a military expert, proposed that it would take several hundred thousand troops to pull this off, the Bush administration shot him down by simply dismissing his idea and keeping the predetermined smaller force. That doesn’t sound like a carefully thought out plan to me. When the Bush administration thinks that they know more about military strategies than a military expert and the rest of the Pentagon that agreed with him, there is going to be problems.

So since Al-Qaeda is not present in Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction were there (therefore confirming that they are not a threat to our national security), what the hell are we doing there? Some would say that we are in Iraq because of the oil interests. Most Iraqis, along with majority of the Middle East, believe that we are there to kill people of the Islam faith. And of course, there is that “feel good story” that a lot of Americans are buying into that we are freeing the oppressed Iraq people by trying to turn them into a democracy. However, all we are doing is trying to unify two religious sects of Islam (Sunni and Shiite) that have been hating each other for longer than our country has been established. On top of that, they hate the United States and our presence in their country more. Bottom line: we are fucked.