Iraq War

The United States led coalition forces, predominantly American, in an attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, against Iraq’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, and his Baathist regime. Coalition troops took control of the capital city of Baghdad less than a month later, and President George W. BuSH declared an end to the Hussein regime. In a televised address from the deck of the U. S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, Bush announced that major combat operations were over but that there was still much work to be done to secure and rebuild Iraq. The objective of securing Iraq continued through 2008, as insurgents waged a guerrilla war against coalition troops and reconstmction projects, and factional violence raged between the majority Shia Muslims and the minority, but powerful, Sunni Muslims.

The war that commenced on March 19 had been long in the making, arising from Hussein’s defiance of international sanctions since the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and from a heightened sense of threat to national security after the deadly terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Hussein was known to have developed and used chemical and biological weapons against Iranians in the 1980s and against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq. The international community insisted that such weapons, known as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), be eliminated. Following the first Persian Gulf War, the United Nations (UN) Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, limiting the proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil to purchasing food and medicines for the Iraqi people until Hussein complied with weapons inspections. The UN sent inspectors to monitor the destruction of chemical, biological, and possible nuclear programs in Iraq. But Hussein limited the sites where the inspectors were allowed to go and on several occasions expelled inspectors, claiming they were spies. In addition, Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay, amassed an army of several hundred thousand men and continued to develop missiles that had been outlawed.

The international community divided over the best approach to achieve Hussein’s cooperation. The United States took a hard line toward Iraq, launching several air strikes during the William J. Clinton administration against suspected weapons-manufacturing sites and pushing for strict enforcement of the economic sanctions in place to maintain pressure until Hussein complied with the UN resolutions. Great Britain joined the United States in this approach. Other member nations of the UN Security Council, such as France, Russia, and China, wanted to ease the economic sanctions to entice cooperation, believing that Hussein had circumvented the sanctions and left the Iraqi people to suffer the consequences of economic hardship.

A U. S. Army soldier provides perimeter security during a reconnaissance patrol at the sight of an insurgent attack near Taji, Iraq, 2006. (Department of Defense)

This division within the UN Security Council precluded the formulation of a coherent international policy toward Iraq.

The terrorist attacks on U. S. soil on September 11, 2001, alerted the Western world to the growing threat of terrorist organizations and their ability to get funding, weapons, and training from regimes sympathetic to their cause. In late 2002 President Bush sought stricter action on Iraq from the UN, as well as authorization to use force against Iraq from the U. S. Congress, claiming that Hussein’s attempts to thwart weapons inspections, his sympathy for militant terrorists, his possession of WMD (later not found), and his utter disregard for his own people posed a growing threat. In early October 2002 Congress approved the use of military force. On November 8 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, Iraq’s final opportunity to comply with weapons inspections. Iraq agreed to admit inspectors from a UN inspection commission, under the leadership of Hans Blix, and from the International Atomic Energy Agency, under Mohammed ElBaradei. In addition, Iraq agreed to provide documented information about its weapons programs.

By mid-December 2002 U. S. Secretary of State CoLiN

L. PoWELL contended that Iraq’s declaration of its weapons was incomplete, and Iraq was in “breach” of the UN resolution. In January 2003 the United States began to build up troop levels in the Persian Gulf; Great Britain committed troops in the event of military action against Iraq. Both Blix and ElBaradei filed inspection reports at the end of January. ElBaradei stated that there was no evidence of nuclear weapons and that the high-precision aluminum tubes Iraq imported were being used to make conventional missiles rather than nuclear weapons, as the United States suspected. Blix stated that no chemical or biological weapons had been found but that Iraq had failed to provide evidence that they had been destroyed. In addition, Iraq was rebuilding long-range missiles in defiance of UN restrictions. On February 5, 2003, Powell appealed to the UN Security Council for a resolution on the use of force against Iraq, citing weapons concerns and links with the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, believed to be operating a terrorist cell run by Palestinian Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. When France, Russia, and China insisted on more time for weapons inspections, the United States and Britain agreed to allow weeks, not months, for full compliance. They set March 17 as the final deadline. On March 17, with troops from the United States, Britain, and Australia poised to strike, Bush issued an ultimatum to the Hussein regime: Saddam and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours or face military action.

Operation Iraqi Freedom began two days later with air strikes aimed at sites in the capital of Baghdad where Hussein and his sons were believed to be hiding, and against military posts in southern Iraq to give access to coalition troops entering Iraq from Kuwait. After a day of air strikes, ground forces rolled across the southern border on March 20. Although Iraq’s attempt to defend itself with missiles was largely ineffective, coalition forces met stiff resistance from Iraqi troops as they tried to advance north to Baghdad. On March 26 the coalition opened a second front in northern Iraq, airlifting soldiers into Kurdish territory so that they could secure an airfield for a larger offensive.

Coalition troops met more resistance than they expected but entered Baghdad by the second week of April and took control of the city by April 9. The two major cities of Kirkuk and Mosul in northern Iraq fell on April 10 and 11, and troops took Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit on April 14. Although victory was not yet complete, reconstruction could begin. The fate of Saddam and his two sons was unknown; however, a televised film of Iraqi crowds helping to topple a 20-foot statue of Saddam, symbolic of his fall from power, became one of the more indelible images of the war to viewers worldwide. Americans were kept apprised of the progress of the war on a real-time basis, as the Department of Defense for the first time allowed the media to travel with military personnel as “embedded” journalists.

The work of rebuilding Iraq was made difficult by looting and disorder, the lack of basic services, violent attacks from insurgents on troops and on infrastructure, and factional violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The UN Security Council lifted economic sanctions on June 22 at Bush’s urging. Although the United States agreed that the UN should play a major role in providing humanitarian aid during reconstruction, the United States retained control over the government-building efforts. In May 2003 Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer III, a veteran of the State Department, as the civilian head of reconstruction. This signaled the U. S. intention to avoid military occupation. Under Bremer’s leadership, a governing council was drawn from various political and religious factions. The Coalition Provisional Authority removed members of the Baath Party from all positions of authority in the government and military, a policy known as the de-Baathification of Iraqi society. The former Iraqi army was disbanded and a new army trained. Lack of experienced officers made efforts to turn security over to Iraqi troops a long, difficult process.

The U. S. military turned its efforts to securing the country from insurgent elements, hunting for weapons caches, and training Iraqi security forces to take over for coalition forces. American forces did not find the stores of biological and chemical weapons Hussein was believed to be hiding. On July 22 Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, died fighting coalition troops in Mosul. On December 13 American troops uncovered Saddam hiding in an underground hole on a farm near Tikrit; he was placed in military custody to await trial in an Iraqi court. Saddam remained defiant to the end. On trial for crimes against humanity, he urged Iraqis to resist coalition forces. He was sentenced to death and hanged on December 30, 2006.

The resistance exacted a high price in both American and Iraqi lives lost since 2003, as insurgents waged guerrilla warfare using improvised explosive devices (IEDs), conventional weapons left over from the Iraqi military, and suicide bombers. By the end of 2007 the number of American military deaths during Operation Iraqi Freedom numbered 3,900. Less than 150 of those occurred during the major combat operations phase of the war. An additional 29,000 military personnel were wounded in action. Of these casualties, 16,000 returned to active duty. The insurgency was fueled by terrorist organizations and by radical religious extremists. In June 2006 the terrorist leader al-Zarqawi was killed in an air strike on a town north of Baghdad; he had been leading a terrorist insurgency against coalition forces and against Shiite Muslims since mid-2003. Factional violence between Sunnis and Shiites further destabilized the region and hampered reconstruction efforts.

The war in Iraq became a political liability for the Bush administration. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 sparked demonstrations in major cities in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, giving rise to an antiwar movement in the United States and anti-American sentiment elsewhere. To the absence of WMD and the violent insurgency that followed major combat actions were added the scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the killing of Iraqi civilians by a private security company, and ongoing court challenges to U. S. policy of holding enemy combatants without trial at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal involved several military police prison guards, including women, who were charged with misconduct for abusing Iraqi prisoners. The scandal fanned flames of antiwar sentiment when pictures of the incidents appeared on TELEVISION. In September 2007 the security firm contracted to protect U. S. officials, Black-water, shot and killed several Iraqi civilians in a crowded area of Baghdad, claiming they had been under attack. The possibility that the shooting was unprovoked strained relations between the United States and Iraq. The detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay raised issues of civil rights for the detainees and concerns about American interrogation practices. Although Congress had authorized the initiative in the beginning, members later tried to distance themselves from their support as the war continued and public support waned.

In the face of political rancor, President Bush remained resolute in his commitment to helping Iraq build a functional democratic government, hold free elections, and rebuild its infrastructure. In early 2007 Bush announced a counterinsurgency strategy to increase troop levels in Iraq by 20,000, the majority of them in Baghdad and the western

Anbar Province. The troop surge was designed to provide security long enough for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the Iraqi government to achieve reconciliation among religious and political factions and to pass legislation that would enable Iraq to assume authority over its own security and reconstruction. By the end of 2008, the number of violent attacks and American and Iraqi casualties had fallen dramatically, but political progress was slow. In late 2008 a status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq was approved, which gave a timetable for the withdrawal of U. S. troops from Iraq, with all U. S. troops out by the end of 2011.

See also Middle East (U. S. relations with);

TERRORISM.

Further reading: Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006); John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Knopf, 2004); Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).

—Cynthia Stachecki