It's funny. Whenever I turn on the news to watch coverage of the war on Iraq, (which is limited in comparison to any other war the United States has waged as of late,) I rarely hear about **why** we have American soldiers in Iraq. If I begged the question "what is the purpose of the Iraq war" 4 years ago, my answer would have been "weapons of mass destruction," right? That is considerably different than the answer we get today. So if you came up to me in the street and said, "hey Sara, why are we in Iraq?" I would regurgitate some nonsense about maintaining democracy in Iraq; which you have probably heard countless times watching the O'Reilly Factor or Countdown with Keith Olberman. But, why *are* we in Iraq? I'm not going to go into the conspiracy theories behind the Iraq war because they are in my opinion, no matter how tempting, completely irrelevant; (we won't really know everything until Bush's files are disclosed years *after* his death, so looking into conspiracy theories now is a waste of time). Instead, lets take a look at the purpose of the Iraq war from the perspective of the American media, and lets just say that we really are in Iraq to maintain democracy. First of all, I find it interesting that the "democratic government" in Iraq had been instilled by the American government. Now I'm no expert on Democracy, but why do I sense that this looks less like a democracy and more like imperialism? Just because you set up voting machines in a country does not automatically make you a democracy. Example: The average person knows enough about Venezuela and President Hugo Chavez to make an assumption about whether or not Venezuela is a democracy. Well, if you take into account that Venezuela has held elections regularly (even recently,) then yeah, it's a democracy because the people are allowed to vote. But it isn't really. This past December, Chavez tried to completely topple whatever "democratic structure" he had in his government when he "marginally lost a December referendum" that would have virtually given him unlimited power as the head of the state. That sounds a lot like a dictatorship to me... All over the world we are seeing democratic government's fail, and countless pseudo democracies put on a show on the world stage. However, what is really going on is that democracy is failing. Are we as individuals losing sight of what really makes a democracy? Did we learn anything from the cold war? Thinking about it in these terms, and no matter how bad we may feel for our American soldiers overseas we have to recognize that Bush may not be doing the worst thing by keeping the troops there. Until Iraq has maintained a stable democracy, the threat of the government being overthrown lessens considerably. And let me tell you, governments get overthrown all of the time, and considering the region it is located, Iraq is highly susceptible to being overthrown. Iraq is too unstable of a region to bring our troops home without first ensuring that the region has at least achieved some level of stability. However, keeping our soldiers there acting as a civil police force to the Iraqi people is getting us absolutely **nowhere** and the notion that our trained military is policing the city of Baghdad is completely ludicrous. Why aren't we helping them help themselves so that we can just get the hell out of there? The longer we are there the more money we borrow to spend there and the deeper we fall into that bottomless pit of debt.

Democracy Failing