How did you feel about the invasion of Iraq leading up to and during it?

[darklordoftech]

?

[VAR]

Always against it

[Alben Barkley]

Well since I was like 12 at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what to think at first. I probably thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (like many Americans much older than 12 who should know better did and some still do) so in that sense thought it was justified, but even at that young age didn’t like the idea of war. Within a couple years I was firmly against both the war and Bush, which is a big part of what got me into politics in the first place.

[Big Abraham]

I was five years old when Uncle Sam launched the invasion, and the only thing I remember during that time was that, besides being constantly mentioned on the news, "Iraq" was a pretty funny way to spell the name of a country. Don't think I knew anything or had any other opinions on it besides that.

When I was old enough to become "politically aware," however, I was against it, although probably more in terms of the hawkish-liberal "the war was mismanaged by Bush, etc." than the more accurate "waging the war was the greatest international crime of this century." It wasn't really until I started reading Chomsky circa age 14 when my I.R./foreign policy views became crystallized into something resembling what they are today.

[LBJer]

I realized it was totally unjustified right from the beginning.  I actually thought it would make the U.S. less safe, because if Saddam really did have WMDs--including biological ones--I thought that in the chaos of the war, they could fall into the wrong hands and end up with al-Qaeda.

[TDAS04]

I was 15 years old when it began.  I was very confused about my personal politics, a bit of a conservative wannabe, and I acted like I didn’t oppose the Iraq War.   Deep down inside I probably knew it was wrong.  By the end of 2006, I was outspokenly against it.

[Proud Houstonian]

aginist it hundreds of thousands of people dead for fake WMDS However Saddam can be due to blame for poking bear but still if Iraq had Chemical Weapons we gave them to them because in Iran-Iraq war We gave Iraq Chemical weapons to fight aginist Iran

[Xing]

I went to an anti-war protest in March 2003, so I was definitely against it before it was cool.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I went to an anti-war protest in March 2003, so I was definitely against it before it was cool.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

I used to love wars on TV because I liked the war reports on television, but yes how old was I, like 7 years old? I mean, as a 7 year old you have no basically no idea of the world around you, and even during the Libya war, I also supported that, but I basically had no political ideology back than. I was probably a conservative because my parents were conservative.

My interest in weather & climate is what made me lean more to the left and left and acknowledging climate change. But it's Bernie Sanders that unleashed the leftist in me. He is the one who truly inspired me to become politically active and politically engaged, and he's the one who made me a leftist.

When I first heard PVDA, i didn't get the appeal of it. They were a fringe minor party. And that was probably just before the 2014 election. Before that, i never heard of them as they were too small. But from what I remember I didn't like socialists as a child. I absolutely didn't like them. I also didn't like the liberals because my parents didn't like them. My parents were christian democrats, but also opposed to the far-right at the time. So I'd think I was most in favour of CD&V (christian democracy), N-VA (conservative nationalist) and LDD (right-wing populist and libertarian), which were the three parties my mom liked most.

As I developed more & more experience, my views actually changed, and I saw things from a different perspective. I interacted with other people from other political beliefs, and that widens your view, but if you only meet people of one kind, of course you're going to support your own kind.

That being said, about the Iraq war, i don't know what my parents thought about it.

Now I think it's one of the most brutal things that did happen in the 21st century. I'm a completely different person than I was when I was a kid. Partially because of the internet and partially because of Bernie Sanders. But not only did my views, ideology, and so on change, my personality also did change abruptly. Some people don't recognize me anymore because of my changed personality.

My views as a child:
Pro-immigration (because I had lots of immigrant friends, and I didn't understand why they were sent back or being threatened by being sent back, but my Kazakh best friend stayed here ultimately, because he had asperger's and because Belgium offered better treatment / support for people suffering with ASD, that was ultimately the only reason why they got permanent citizenship). They're right-wingers though (probably anti-communist sentiment, as his parents grew up in the USSR).

Very interventionist / very hawkish i believe in terms of foreign policy

No understanding of economic issues, i really don't know what I believed in, but as a child you don't care, because in what ways does it affect you?

In terms of social issues... i also have no clue what I believed in. I don't think it mattered to me. I think I changed from pro-police to anti-police at the point I started smoking weed though.

anti-religion though... the prospects of hell and non-believers frightened me, so I remember on Good Friday i always was frightened of not being a good person. I also didn't like going to the church with school, which is why i've started to absolutely hate religion in everyway possible, and I don't think that ever changed, even though i moderate my views when I talk about other people about religion, but deeply inside it's the most disgusting thing ever.

I also bought things like 2012 immediately... lol. More in the sense that I didn't believe what was going to happen. I think conspiracy theorists that spread these kind of theories should be sentenced to life-long sentences though. They make a large size of the population believe those kind of theories, while they turn out to be completely false and hysterical. I'm very angry that I ever bought those kind of stories. Also that story of the Hadron Cell Collider that would create a black hole that would usurp our planet, i also bought that.

I was a very naive child.

It still surprises me... how in 2011 someone said he thinks i would later become a well-known politician. I was like: "are you out of your mind? I don't like politics. I don't know anything about it, lol...". He used to be one of my main bullies in primary school (actually the main bully), but now we often talk about on facebook, sometimes about politics, and supports the same party as me. (lol)

I also stated sometimes that I wanted to be a girl, for which i was being ridiculed lol.

Children are just idiots sometimes, and they don't know it, and realize it later.

[Diabolical Materialism]

I was like five, but I remember all the adults in my podunk town being really excited about it.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I was around 12 years old at the time and entirely against the war, thought it was all about oil. Remember arguing with my older brother who was convinced by Colin Powell's speech to the UN that Saddam had WMDs and I wasn't. Passed around a piece of paper in one of my classes at school asking if my classmates supported or opposed the war, and if I remember correctly it was a landslide against.

Of course being a tweenage boy when the shooting actually started my main emotion was of excitement that I would get to watch a war happening in real time.

[AncestralDemocrat.]

Against it.

[ηєω ƒяσηтιєя]

I was only 4 years old in 2003. I don't have any political memories from then. My earliest political memories are from 2006-2008.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

"Wow, there's all these soldiers with cool weapons on TV, way better than the boring stuff that's usually on the news!"

"They took down the statue of the big bad guy, we won!"

"Why isn't the war over, are the bad guys going to win?"

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I went to an anti-war protest in March 2003, so I was definitely against it before it was cool.

I went to one as well, though I was sort of tagging along with a girl I liked and I would not say I was *definitely* against it.  I leaned toward believing it was a bad idea - quite likely a terrible one - but was still unsure and recognized arguments on the other side.  Seeing at that protest people wanting to make it about being anti-Bush/Israel/capitalism/etc. did not do much to convince me of their cause.  A part of me wanted deeply to see the people of Iraq liberated both from the tyranny of Saddam's regime and the sanctions they were suffering. I thought just maybe a hopefully short war would be better for them than the awful status quo stalemate, while removing a security threat. But it could also be an absolute disaster.  What if the nation falls apart into civil war? And if it was true that they had WMDs, what would happen if they used them in response to an attack?

[jaymichaud]

Obviously should have never happened and was too young to be paying attention at the time.