Iraq War

Military conflict between Iraq and the United States following a US-led allied invasion of Iraq in March 2003

The Iraq War, also known as the Second Gulf War, was a military conflict initiated by the United States to remove the dictatorial regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The war began when the United States led a global coalition force in a military invasion of Iraq in March 2003, after several years of international diplomatic efforts to assess Iraq’s weapons programs had failed due to a lack of cooperation by the Hussein regime.

Allegations of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Following the culmination of the first Gulf War (1990–91) and the Hussein regime’s failed invasion of neighboring Kuwait, Iraq was forbidden by the United Nations to purchase, manufacture, or store weapons of mass destruction. The Hussein regime was forced to comply with a UN Security Council resolution mandating that an international group of weapons inspectors be allowed to continually survey all Iraqi military operations for any evidence of such weapons. Iraq begrudgingly maintained compliance with UN weapons inspectors through 2002, when the nation’s cooperation began to wane due to the regime’s frustration with long-standing UN economic sanctions against it and its perceived threat of neighboring Iran.

In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush went public with a report from British intelligence sources that claimed Iraq’s dismissal of weapons inspectors was part of a larger plan to accumulate material to build a nuclear weapon. In his speech, Bush also vaguely alluded to an association between the Hussein regime and unnamed terrorist entities. This accusation was particularly significant in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. Despite protests from key NATO allies such as Canada, France, and Germany, leaders in the United States and in Great Britain, notably Prime Minister Tony Blair, were eager to proceed with invasion plans and vanquish Saddam Hussein.

In February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a speech before the United Nations assembly in which he presented the case for international military action against Iraq. In his presentation, Powell claimed that several Iraqi defectors had informed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of an elaborate chemical and biological weapons system operated by the Hussein regime. Powell referred to evidence illustrating that Iraq was in possession of mobile chemical weapons laboratories, as well as large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Powell’s assertions did not quell continued calls for diplomacy. Former US president Bill Clinton, Bush’s army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, and French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin were some of the most prominent statesmen who spoke out publicly against the potential perils of an invasion of Iraq. Most notable of their concerns was the potential for violent clashes between Iraq’s historically opposed Shiite and Sunni Muslim majorities in the absence of the Hussein regime.

Yet the Bush and Blair administrations stood fast on their assertion that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, the United Kingdom, and the entire international community. The Bush administration rationalized a military invasion of the country not only due to accumulating weapons evidence but also under the aggressive antiterrorist foreign policy measures enacted by the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks. This conglomeration of legislation, military strategy, and foreign policy principles would eventually become known as the Bush Doctrine.

Invasion and Iraqi Defense

In a public address on March 17, 2003, President Bush issued an ultimatum demanding that Saddam Hussein relinquish control of Iraq and depart the country within forty-eight hours or face a United States–led invasion. Hussein refused the demand. On March 20, the United States and allied forces commenced the invasion of Iraq, staged from US bases in neighboring Kuwait and aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.

The Iraqi capital of Baghdad was heavily bombarded by airstrikes in the early hours of the war, during the US military operation dubbed Shock and Awe. These initial air strikes destroyed key Iraqi military communication apparatuses and almost completely destroyed its already-inferior air force. Shock and Awe was also later revealed to have targeted Hussein himself, his sons, and senior members of Iraqi military leadership—although much of the Iraqi power structure, though weakened, would survive.

Continued widespread US airstrikes on Iraqi defense systems and weapons caches severely limited the strength of opposition forces in the war’s opening weeks. Convincingly outmanned and operating at the discretion of a swiftly deteriorating leadership, the majority of the Iraqi army was overwhelmed by allied forces approximately three weeks after the invasion began. Hussein’s malnourished and poorly equipped army surrendered in droves.

Allied invasion forces faced more formidable resistance in pockets of major Iraqi cities from Hussein’s Republican Guard, a contingent of the regime’s most loyal troops. Some of the war’s most ferocious fighting took place in the southern city of Nasiriyah and the central Iraqi city of Fallujah.

On May 1, 2003, less than two months after the beginning of the invasion, President Bush gave a public address on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq. With the Iraqi army officially disbanded, the remaining lawlessness and smattering of violence propagated by anti-American forces were deemed by Bush and officials within his administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as the last desperate actions of a defeated force.

Despite the declaration of victory, the Hussein regime’s weapons stockpiles and manufacturing facilities that were so paramount in the US justification of the invasion would never materialize. A 2005 presidential commission on Iraq’s weapons capability determined that none of the prewar Iraqi weapons intelligence utilized by Great Britain and the United States was factually accurate.

Capture of Hussein

Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, were key figures in the dictatorship throughout their father’s decades in power. Both were killed in an allied ambush in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in July 2003. Yet Saddam himself managed to elude capture for several months after the invasion.

With an upsurge in violence against American and UN targets in Iraq throughout the summer of that year, many military and media analysts considered the possibility that Hussein was leading the insurgency while in hiding. Yet with his country overthrown, his sons dead, and most of his inner circle gone, including close family members who were now acting in cooperation with allied forces, the prevailing assumption was that Hussein’s resources, mobility, and influence were in rapid decline.

Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003, at a farmhouse not far outside the city of Tikrit. He was held at a US facility near Baghdad International Airport until the following June, when Iraq's interim government officially took custody of him and several other prisoners. The Iraqi Special Tribunal (later renamed the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal) charged Hussein with hundreds of counts of murder, torture, and illegal arrest. He was found guilty on November 5, 2006, and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on December 30, 2006.

Post-Invasion Insurgency

US military commanders were significantly caught off guard by the ferocity and magnitude of the anti-American sentiment in the years following the toppling of the Hussein regime. The anti-American forces in Iraq comprised a diverse mix of those loyal to Hussein’s Ba’athist political party, Iraqi nationals who disliked the notion of acquiescing to a new American-backed government after years of oppression, and Shia militias who wanted to forge stronger ties between Iraq and Iran, among others. Sunni Muslim religious tribes also made up a large contingent of the insurgents; they had a long history of sectarian violence with Shiite Muslims, a large contingent of whom had aligned with the United States and allied forces, and feared domination by Iraq's Shiite majority following the removal of the Sunni-aligned Hussein.

The violence between the two warring factions reached such heights that by 2008, many analysts considered Iraq to be in the throes of a civil war. The insurgency stretched US and allied forces to a point where they could rarely be called upon to perform routine security, such as the border and street patrols necessary to protect Iraqi civilians, US leadership, and pro-Western Iraqi politicians who were eager to begin construction on a new government. The result was a heavy American reliance on private military contractors and commercial security services, organizations that would come to be utilized more during the Iraq War than in any other military conflict in history. The US government would spend over $100 billion on private security firms throughout the war. Numerous incidents of cultural insensitivity and aggressive posturing by private contractors would weaken the reputation of allied forces throughout the conflict.

The Iraq War at Decade’s End

International opinion of the United States and allied invasion force took a significant blow in 2004, after human-rights violations by US soldiers against detained Iraqi soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison complex came to light. Leaked photographs outlined systematic torture, rape, and psychological abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US soldiers. The Abu Ghraib scandal would eventually shed light on the widespread use of torture by the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks, both in Iraq and in US military installations throughout the world.

The 2005 investigation surrounding the Downing Street Memo, an outline of a 2002 British government meeting stating that US officials had fixed intelligence and facts regarding Hussein’s weapons stockpiles and military capability to justify the war, fueled widespread American and international dissatisfaction with the genesis and strategy surrounding the conflict. In an attempt to quell civil dissatisfaction with the war and regain control over continually recalcitrant insurgent forces, President Bush announced a plan to deploy nearly twenty-five thousand additional American troops into Iraq in his January 2007 State of the Union Address.

The Surge, as it would come to be known, would be a pivotal topic in the run-up to the 2008 US presidential campaign, which pitted Republican senator John McCain against Democratic senator Barack Obama. Obama’s pledge to end the Iraq War was a major part of his platform, and American dissatisfaction with the conflict was one of the major factors to which his substantial victory over McCain was attributed.

The quelling of the major violence in Iraq by the end of the 2000s was largely attributed to the US troop surge of 2007, along with increased compromise and the dwindling military capabilities of Iraqi insurgent leaders. By 2009, the Obama administration had begun the long process of withdrawing American forces in Iraq, leaving in its place a new, allied-trained Iraqi army.

The Iraq left behind by invading forces was far from the peaceful, democratic nation the leaders of the United States and Great Britain had envisioned at the war’s outset. Iraq and its diverse population would continue to grapple with the vast, long-standing cultural and ethnic conflicts and violent power struggles that rapidly transformed their country after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The United States military officially completed its departure of Iraq in December 2011.

Impact

The human toll and exorbitant financial cost of the Iraq War notwithstanding, the conflict also served as a sea change in the American perception of military conflict. The majority of US military action since the Vietnam War had been supported by the American public as a necessary evil with which to uphold the values of Western democracy. However, the Iraq War was made far less palatable in terms of public perception, due to its questionable genesis, rampant media coverage, and ghastly guerrilla-style violence. Never before had the vulnerability of the US Armed Forces been made so readily apparent.

The Bush administration’s flawed reasoning surrounding the invasion of Iraq also reopened the debate on the power of the executive branch over the armed services, the role of Congress in formal declarations of war, and the future role of the United States military as the global defender of those living under oppressed regimes. The war also brought to bear questions regarding the aging notion of the United States as a global superpower and whether traditionally powerful military forces such as those of the United States and Great Britain were equipped to handle a large-scale guerilla insurgency.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jon Lee. The Fall of Baghdad. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Bolger, Daniel P. Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Boston: Houghton, 2014. Print.

Cockburn, Patrick. "Iraq's Permanent Crisis." Nation 8 Apr. 2013: 17–19. Print.

Murphy, Dan. “Siege of Fallujah Polarizing Iraqis.” Christian Science Monitor. Christian Science Monitor, 15 Apr. 2004. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.

Schell, Jonathan. "The Iraq Disaster." Nation 1 Apr. 2013: 3–8. Print.

Sifry, Micah L., and Christopher Cerf, eds. The Iraq War Reader. New York: Touchstone, 2003. Print.

Singal, Jesse, Christine Lim, and M. J. Stephey. “Seven Years in Iraq: An Iraq War Timeline.” Time. Time, 19 Mar. 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.

United States. Executive Office of the President. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Unclassified Version of the Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Washington: GPO, 2005. US Government Printing Office. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.