2003 invasion of Iraq

Based on Wikipedia: 2003 invasion of Iraq

On the morning of March twentieth, 2003, American cruise missiles struck the Presidential Palace in Baghdad. Within hours, coalition tanks rolled across the Kuwait border into southern Iraq. Twenty-two days later, American forces stood in the heart of Baghdad. The Iraqi government had collapsed.

It was one of the fastest military victories in modern history. It was also one of the most controversial.

The Official Justification

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the world they were invading Iraq for three reasons: to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to liberate the Iraqi people from dictatorship.

The weapons claim drove everything else. Bush and Blair described Iraq's alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as an "immediate and intolerable threat to world peace." This wasn't presented as a distant possibility or a future concern. The language was urgent, existential.

There was just one problem. Right before the invasion began, United Nations inspectors led by Hans Blix reported that they had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq. None.

The disconnect was stark. The United States and Britain were preparing for war based on weapons that UN inspectors couldn't locate. Some of America's closest allies—Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand—publicly opposed the invasion. In September 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan would call the invasion illegal under international law, a breach of the UN Charter itself.

On February fifteenth, 2003, one month before the first bombs fell, an estimated three million people gathered in Rome for an anti-war protest. Guinness World Records certified it as the largest anti-war rally in human history. Similar demonstrations erupted across the globe. The world was watching, and much of it was saying no.

The Invasion Itself

The war began with what the Pentagon called "shock and awe"—massive air strikes designed to overwhelm Iraq's command and control systems before ground forces even crossed the border. After the initial strike on Baghdad's Presidential Palace, coalition forces launched their main incursion from Kuwait.

The coalition wasn't massive by historical standards. It consisted primarily of American and British forces, with smaller contingents from Australia and Poland. But what it lacked in numbers, it made up for in technological superiority and speed.

Special forces moved quickly to secure Basra and the surrounding oil fields in southern Iraq. The main invasion force drove north, encountering surprisingly light resistance. There was fighting—the Battle of Nasiriyah on March twenty-third saw genuine combat—but nothing like the bloody urban warfare many had predicted.

In the north, the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted near Kirkuk, linking up with Kurdish rebels who had their own reasons for wanting Saddam gone. Together they secured the northern region while the main force continued its drive toward Baghdad.

The Iraqi military, once considered the fourth-largest in the world, melted away. Years of sanctions and isolation had hollowed it out. Some units fought briefly then retreated. Others simply disappeared, soldiers abandoning their posts and blending back into the civilian population.

Baghdad fell on April ninth after six days of battle. Other cities followed in quick succession: Kirkuk on April tenth, Tikrit on April fifteenth. Saddam Hussein and Iraq's central leadership went into hiding. On May first, President Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and declared an end to major combat operations.

The invasion period was over. It had lasted just over one month.

The Long Road to War

To understand how America arrived at this moment, you have to rewind more than a decade.

The Gulf War of 1991 had ended with Saddam still in power. A UN-brokered ceasefire left Iraq subject to weapons inspections, economic sanctions, and no-fly zones enforced by American and British aircraft. The policy was called "containment"—keep Saddam weak, keep him boxed in, but don't invade.

The inspections revealed disturbing things. Iraq had developed biological weapons in the early 1980s with unwitting help from the United States and Europe, in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) also uncovered evidence of a chemical weapons program. But investigators concluded these programs had been dismantled after the Gulf War.

Still, the no-fly zones remained, and Iraqi military aircraft regularly tested them. Inspections continued. Sanctions ground down Iraq's economy. The policy seemed to be working, if "working" meant keeping Saddam contained rather than removed.

Then in October 1998, everything shifted. The U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change—overthrowing Saddam Hussein—official American foreign policy. The act allocated ninety-seven million dollars to support Iraqi opposition groups working toward "a transition to democracy."

This was a fundamental departure from UN Security Council Resolution 687, which focused on weapons programs and said nothing about removing governments. One month after the Iraq Liberation Act passed, the United States and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign supposedly aimed at Iraq's weapons capabilities but also designed, as U.S. intelligence hoped, to weaken Saddam's grip on power.

A New Administration, A New Approach

When George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000, the shift became more pronounced. The Republican platform that year called for "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act as "a starting point" to remove Saddam.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later claimed that planning for an attack on Iraq began at Bush's very first National Security Council meeting. O'Neill would partially walk back this claim, suggesting it was a continuation of Clinton-era policies, but the basic thrust remained: the new administration was more interested in invasion than containment.

Yet despite this interest, little concrete movement happened. Not until September eleventh, 2001.

September Eleventh and the Pivot

On that bright Tuesday morning, nineteen hijackers from the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda commandeered four commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly three thousand people died. More than six thousand were injured.

By midday, signals intelligence from the National Security Agency pointed clearly to al-Qaeda. The attacks were Osama bin Laden's work, carried out by his network based in Afghanistan under Taliban protection.

But by mid-afternoon on September eleventh, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was already asking his staff to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. Notes from aides present that day record Rumsfeld's instructions: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H."—Saddam Hussein—"at same time. Not only UBL"—Osama bin Laden.

The reasoning, such as it was, seemed to be shock. The attacks were sophisticated. Surely, some administration officials thought, a state sponsor must have been involved. Iraq became a prime suspect, despite having no obvious connection to al-Qaeda.

President Bush ordered his counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, to investigate possible Iraqi involvement. Clarke's office issued a memo on September eighteenth noting "wide ideological gaps" between secular Ba'athist Iraq and fundamentalist al-Qaeda. The evidence linking them was weak and anecdotal at best.

A September twenty-first Presidential Daily Brief, prepared at Bush's request, concluded that the intelligence community had "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with al-Qaeda." The few contacts that did exist appeared to be Iraqi attempts to monitor the group, not collaborate with it.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld were skeptical of these CIA assessments. They pointed to the agency's past failures—missing the Iranian Revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why trust the CIA now?

They preferred outside analysis, including information supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group with its own agenda. This information claimed a "highly secretive relationship" between Saddam and al-Qaeda dating back to 1992, supposedly involving Iraq's Intelligence Service.

None of it held up to scrutiny. There was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. But the narrative was taking shape.

Building the Case

On September twentieth, 2001, Bush addressed Congress and the nation, announcing his "war on terror" and articulating what would become known as the Bush Doctrine—the principle of pre-emptive military action against perceived threats before they could materialize.

In November, Bush instructed Rumsfeld to review OPLAN 1003, the existing war plan for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, to refine the plans. A record of their meeting includes the telling question: "How start?" followed by a list of possible justifications for war.

Some advisers wanted immediate invasion. Others argued for building an international coalition and securing UN authorization. Bush chose to seek UN backing while reserving the right to invade without it—a hedge that would prove significant.

Throughout this period, the administration waited. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card would later explain with remarkable candor: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." They would make their case in the fall.

The Marketing Campaign

On September twelfth, 2002—exactly one year and one day after the terrorist attacks—Bush addressed the UN General Assembly and formally made his case for invading Iraq. That same day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu testified before Congress, offering "expert testimony" that there was "no question" Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The reactions split along familiar lines. Britain supported American plans. France and Germany argued for continued diplomacy and inspections. After considerable debate, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 in November 2002, a compromise that authorized resumed weapons inspections and promised "serious consequences" for non-compliance.

France and Russia made clear they didn't interpret "serious consequences" to mean military invasion. Both the American and British UN ambassadors publicly confirmed this reading, assuring the Security Council that the resolution provided no "automaticity" or "hidden triggers" for war without further consultation.

Resolution 1441 gave Iraq "a final opportunity" to prove it had disarmed. Saddam accepted the resolution on November thirteenth. Inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) returned to Iraq under Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei.

By February 2003, their findings were unambiguous. The IAEA "found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program." Items that could theoretically be used for nuclear enrichment—aluminum tubes, for instance—were actually intended for conventional rockets. UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction."

The inspectors did supervise destruction of some materials: a small number of empty chemical rocket warheads, fifty liters of mustard gas that Iraq had declared and UNSCOM had sealed in 1998, laboratory quantities of a mustard gas precursor, and about fifty Al-Samoud missiles that had exceeded their permitted range in tests. But these were remnants, not active programs.

Blix stated it would take "months" to verify full compliance with Resolution 1441. The Bush administration decided not to wait.

Selling the War at Home

In October 2002, Congress passed the Iraq Resolution, authorizing the President to "use any means necessary" against Iraq. But the American public was split. Polls from January 2003 showed most Americans favored continued diplomacy over invasion.

The administration launched an elaborate public relations campaign. By February 2003, it was working. Sixty-four percent of Americans now supported military action to remove Saddam from power. Eighty-five percent believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, even though inspectors hadn't found them. Of those who believed weapons existed somewhere, about half thought they wouldn't be found even in combat.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush claimed "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs." This assertion would become infamous.

On February fifth, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council, presenting what was billed as definitive proof of Iraq's weapons programs. His presentation included a computer-generated image of a "mobile biological weapons laboratory."

The source for this claim was an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball"—Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. His information would later prove entirely fabricated. But in that moment, Powell's reputation as a careful, credible figure lent weight to claims that would soon crumble.

What Happened Next

The invasion succeeded militarily beyond what many planners had expected. General David Petraeus later recalled that before the war, "the prevailing wisdom was that we were going to have a long, hard fight to Baghdad." The 101st Airborne Division prepared extensively for urban combat, expecting brutal street-to-street fighting.

It didn't happen that way. Baghdad fell in less than a month. Saddam went into hiding and was eventually captured on December thirteenth, 2003, found in a spider hole near Tikrit.

But Bush's "Mission Accomplished" declaration would become one of history's great premature victories. The invasion period ended quickly. The occupation that followed—the insurgency, the sectarian violence, the grinding years of instability—lasted far longer and cost far more than the initial combat ever did.

And the weapons of mass destruction, the central justification for everything, were never found. Because they didn't exist.

What began as a lightning military victory became a case study in the distance between stated intentions and actual outcomes, between the certainty of intelligence assessments and the complexity of reality, between the speed of invasion and the difficulty of occupation. The 2003 invasion of Iraq lasted just over a month. Its consequences lasted decades.