War on Iraq Article in High School Newspaper

At 7:12PM on Wednesday, March19, 2003, President Bush authorized a full-scale war on Iraq and the Saddam Hussein led regime by uttering just two simple words. "Let's go," President George W. Bush said to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield Wednesday at the close of a nearly four-hour meeting in the Oval Office. The war on Iraq, which has been given the title "Operation: Iraqi Freedom", is the result of months of Hussein's refusal to let United Nations weapons inspectors into Iraq. The U.N. suspects that Hussein has been building and harboring "weapons of mass destruction" into Iraq. This problem goes as far back as the early ‘90's when former President Bush initiated the Gulf War on account of very similar issues. Aside from not letting U.N. inspectors into Iraq, Hussein has been a brutal dictator towards his own people for the better part of a decade. President Bush says that one of the main objectives of winning this war is to completely rebuild Iraq and make it a safe place for people to live. To do this, the American troops must take Hussein out of power.

The beginning of the war was preceded by a forty-eight hour period that President Bush had given Hussein for a chance to comply with the U.N. and avoid war. President Bush's final attempts at peace were not accepted and he began what the Pentagon is calling a "decapitation attack". More than forty satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from U.S. warships in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. In the days soon afterward, American troops advanced into Iraq and launched a head-on attack towards Iraq's capital city of Baghdad. Iraqi officials reported that only in the first two days of these attacks, that seventy-two missiles had hit Baghdad, killing four Iraqi officials.

Another school year is coming to a close, as is a chapter in the senior class of 2003's lives. As the excitement escalades and the dream of leaving high school is becoming more and more of a reality, the seniors are realizing that their senior year is different from previous senior classes. They are graduating during a time of war, a time that could