U.S.-Iraq War

I

Introduction

U.S.-Iraq War, military action begun in 2003 with a United States invasion of Iraq, then ruled by the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein. The invasion led to a protracted U.S. occupation of Iraq and the birth of a guerrilla insurgency against the occupation. The resulting destabilization of Iraq also created conditions for a civil war to break out between Iraq’s majority Shia Muslim population and its minority Sunni Muslim population. In addition to attempting to quell the insurgency, U.S. forces also found themselves trying to police the civil war. By 2007 the U.S. war in Iraq had lasted longer than U.S. involvement in World War II.

U.S. president George W. Bush had openly threatened war for months prior to the U.S. invasion. Bush argued that in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a grave threat to U.S. security and peace in the region because of its alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism. Subsequent disclosures by former high-level officials within the Bush administration, however, revealed that Bush had been preparing for the use of military force against Iraq almost as soon as he took office in January 2001. (A call for the ouster of Hussein had been official U.S. policy ever since Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, although passage of the act did not commit the United States to the use of military force.)

Bush launched the war with an invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The previous day a U.S. air strike attempted but failed to assassinate Hussein. U.S. and British forces (and smaller numbers of Australian and Polish soldiers) invaded Iraq from Kuwait. They faced an Iraqi military of less than 400,000 troops, the backbone of which was ten armored and mechanized divisions. These divisions were quickly devastated by U.S. air attacks. Major combat engagements ended about three weeks later, after U.S. troops entered Baghdād, the capital of Iraq, and toppled the Hussein regime. The military campaign was short and one-sided, but hard fought.

In all, 138 U.S. service personnel were killed from the start of the war until President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003. Of these, 115 died in combat while the rest died due to traffic accidents, drowning, illness, or other causes. However, coalition forces continued to suffer casualties after May 1 as an urban guerrilla resistance began to develop.

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By late April 2003, a serious and persistent guerrilla struggle had been launched in the Sunni Arab heartland against the foreign military presence in the country. Abetted by a U.S. decision to dissolve the Iraqi army and the U.S. failure to stop widespread looting, the guerrilla movement grew in strength and popular support in the center-north of the country, making it impossible for the United States to withdraw most of its troops in summer and fall of 2003, as the Department of Defense had intended. See also Guerrilla Warfare.

The total U.S. military death toll had doubled by late August 2004 and reached more than 4,000 following the fifth anniversary of the invasion. The year 2007 was the deadliest year for U.S. forces since the war began, with 894 U.S. soldiers killed in that year alone. The number of U.S. wounded totaled about 30,000 by March 2008, the beginning of the sixth year of the U.S. occupation. Other member nations of the coalition that suffered casualties included the United Kingdom, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Slovakia, El Salvador, The Netherlands, Thailand, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Australia.

Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have been killed in the war, although U.S. military officials do not publicly keep a count of Iraqi insurgent or civilian casualties. A number of studies and estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths have arrived at radically different figures. For example, the British-based Iraq Body Count, which bases its casualty figures on media reports, hospital records, and other sources, reported that the number of dead Iraqi civilians ranged from 82,000 to 90,000 by March 2008. The deaths were of noncombatants killed by military or paramilitary forces. However, a year earlier, in October 2006, a study published in a British medical journal, The Lancet, by a team of U.S. epidemiologists and Iraqi physicians estimated that about 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the war, with about 600,000 deaths directly attributable to violence.

Both the U.S. and the Iraqi governments disputed the The Lancet study, but the researchers based at Johns Hopkins University defended their results. They said the study was based on a widely accepted scientific method known as cluster sampling and that a majority of the deaths in the sample were substantiated by death certificates. Similar cluster samples have been accepted as valid in other troubled regions, such as Darfur.

In January 2008, researchers with the World Health Organization and the Iraqi Ministry of Health in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that 151,000 Iraqis, both civilians and fighters, died violently from March 2003 to June 2006. The study was reportedly the largest to date because it was based on a survey of 10,000 Iraqi households.

The war also led to a refugee crisis in Iraq. By the end of 2007 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 2.3 million Iraqis had fled their country and another 2.3 million had been displaced from their homes within Iraq.

II

Background to the War

The seeds for the U.S.-Iraq War were sown by the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which took place during the administration of U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush’s father. During the Persian Gulf War, allied forces evicted Iraqi troops from Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990. After allied forces defeated the Iraqi army, armed rebellion against Hussein’s rule broke out among the Shia Muslims of the south, who had suffered years of oppression under Hussein’s Sunni Muslim regime (see Shia Islam; Sunni Islam). The Bush administration had encouraged Iraqis to rebel in the hope that Hussein would be overthrown, but removing him from power was not an explicit objective of the allies. The administration was wary of involving itself in the fighting inside Iraq and was apprehensive about the consequences of a Shia victory. It decided not to intervene. Lacking international aid, the rebellion was crushed by Hussein's remaining forces. Many Iraqi Shia never forgave the United States for what they saw as a betrayal.

A

UN Weapons Inspections

As part of the cease-fire arrangements after the Persian Gulf War, the United Nations (UN) Security Council ordered Iraq to eliminate its programs to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. A system of UN inspections was established to oversee this process. Over the next decade UN inspectors made important strides in disarming Iraq, but faced resistance from Iraqi authorities to their requests that all information about the destruction of stockpiles be made available. Iraq denied inspectors access to some sites within the country, and much of the information Iraq provided about its weapons programs was viewed as incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading. Some inspectors believed that Iraq had destroyed 85 percent of its stockpiles, and in retrospect they were more nearly correct, but others remained suspicious that Iraq was hoarding biological and chemical weapons or capabilities. See also Chemical and Biological Warfare.

Frustrated by Iraq’s apparent refusal to cooperate, U.S. president Bill Clinton ordered a series of air strikes in 1998 aimed at destroying Iraq’s weapons-making capability. UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn shortly before the United States and Britain carried out three days of air attacks. Following the air strikes, Iraq resisted the resumption of UN inspections. No inspections were conducted for four years, a development that led to considerable uncertainty in Washington about the status of Iraq’s weapons programs.

B

Making the Case for War

B

1

“Neoconservatives” and the Bush Doctrine

Long before President George W. Bush took office in 2001, elements in or close to the Republican Party had called repeatedly for firmer U.S. steps against Iraq, including a war if necessary to force a regime change. One such group authored a white paper in 1996 called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was later sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Israel’s Likud Party. It advocated a war against Iraq as a way of undermining Syria and of moderating the Shia Hezbollah of southern Lebanon, arguing that these actions would pave the way for peace and stability in a notoriously unstable part of the world. The paper came out of discussions among foreign policy experts, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, many of whom later occupied important positions in the Bush administration.

In 1997 some of the same individuals joined the newly formed Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a Washington think tank that argued openly for the United States to play a dominant role, militarily and diplomatically, in the world. The PNAC wrote a letter to President Clinton in January 1998 calling for “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime” from power and urging Clinton to use “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts” to accomplish this. The letter warned that if Hussein acquired weapons of mass destruction, “the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.” Iraq’s oil reserves are estimated to be the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia. Signatories to the letter included Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, William Kristol, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Donald Rumsfeld.

A month later the same signatories joined a broader group of foreign policy and defense experts known as the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf in another open letter to President Clinton. This letter was more explicit in calling for the use of military force, including a call for a “systematic air campaign” to destroy Iraq’s Republican Guard divisions. These efforts helped lead to the Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress and signed by Clinton in 1998, which made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy. In the Bush administration of three years later, Wolfowitz would become deputy secretary of defense, with Rumsfeld as his boss. Abrams would become a National Security Council adviser on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bolton would be an undersecretary of state and then ambassador to the United Nations. Khalilzad served as ambassador to post-Taliban Afghanistan and then to post-Saddam Iraq.

Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, and others in their circle maintained that by democratizing Middle East countries with authoritarian regimes, the chances were greater of promoting peace in that region. In addition, many of these advisers were politically sympathetic both to the right wing of the Republican Party and to the Likud Party in Israel. Many had been, or their parents had been, on the political left, but they had typically become Republicans in the late 1970s or in the 1980s, driven by a belief that the Democratic Party was soft on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and that the American left was increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. Because of their turn to the right, they were known as neoconservatives. Many of the so-called neoconservatives, however, reject this label.

Because of their key positions in the Department of Defense, including in Vice President Dick Cheney’s own national security council, and in the Near East and South Asia division’s Office of Special Plans under Feith, the neoconservatives were in a position to influence Bush administration policy on Iraq. Some critics accused them of being overly eager to believe shaky intelligence on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs provided by expatriate politician Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, much of which was later found to be false.

This circle was not the only one interested in an Iraq war. George W. Bush repeatedly said in the late 1990s and in 2000 that among his aspirations in life was to “take out” Saddam Hussein, who he believed was behind an assassination attempt on his father. Cheney had signed the 1998 PNAC letter calling for regime change, even though as secretary of defense in the early 1990s he had opposed ousting Hussein by sending U.S. forces on to Baghdād from Kuwait, saying that it would be a mistake to be “bogged down” in a quagmire. Rumsfeld reportedly saw ousting Hussein and establishing an Iraqi government aligned with U.S. interests as the key to changing the entire Middle East region. Moreover, by September 2002, the Bush administration had outlined a new foreign policy strategy, known as the Bush Doctrine, which called for preemptive war to prevent terrorists or state sponsors of terrorism from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Doctrine also held that the United States would act unilaterally if necessary to guarantee that the United Sates remained the sole superpower in the world.

In contrast, three major wings of the Republican Party warned against an Iraq war. The so-called realists who had dominated the foreign policy establishment of President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s, such as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker, publicly argued against an invasion of Iraq. Likewise, isolationists such as Patrick Buchanan opposed such a war, as did the libertarian wing of the party, which fears big government.

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