Iraq War

The Iraq War was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a multinational coalition led by the United States of America. Military operations were conducted by forces from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland, and was supported in various ways by many other countries, some of which allowed attacks to be launched or controlled from their territory. The U.N. neither approved nor censured the war, which was never a formally declared war. The U.S. refers to it as Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. Continuing operations are under the command of Multi-National Force-Iraq.

This war is to be distinguished from the Gulf War of 1991, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Gulf War had United Nations authorization. Further, both these wars should be differentiated from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988.

The war had quick result of the removal (and later execution) of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the formation of a democratically elected parliament and ratified constitution, which won UN approval. However, an amorphous insurgency since then has produced large numbers of civilian deaths and an unstable Iraqi government. It has generated enormous political controversy in the U.S. and other countries.

The main rationale for the invasion was Iraq’s continued violation of the 1991 agreement (in particular United Nations Resolution 687) that the country allow UN weapons inspectors unhindered access to nuclear facilities, as well as the country’s failure to observe several UN resolutions ordering Iraq to comply with Resolution 687. The US government cited intelligence reports that Iraq was actively supporting terrorists and developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as additional and acute reasons to invade. Though there was some justification before October 2002 for believing this intelligence credible, a later Senate investigation found that the intelligence was inaccurate and that the intelligence community failed to communicate this properly to the Bush administration.

Clinton Policy and Weapons Inspections
After the Gulf War in 1991, United Nations Resolution 687 specified that Iraq must destroy all weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A large amount of WMDs were indeed destroyed under UN supervision (UNSCOM). Two no-fly zones were also instituted in northern and southern Iraq where Iraqi military aircraft were prohibited from flying. The United States and the United Kingdom (and France until 1998) patrolled these zones.

However, by late 1997 the the Clinton administration became dissatisfied with Iraq’s increased unwillingness to cooperate with UNSCOM inspectors. In January 1998, a number of American neoconservative military experts wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton, in an effort to convince the president that the policy of containment was not working and that there was a real possibility Iraq would reconstitute its WMD arsenal. The group urged the president to invade Iraq in order to remove Saddam Hussein from power. As a result of widespread expectations that the Clinton administration would decide to act with military force, the UN weapons inspectors were evacuated from the country. Iraq and the United Nations agreed to resume weapons inspections, but Saddam Hussein continued to obstruct UNSCOM teams throughout the remainder of 1998.

In December 1998, President Clinton authorized military action against Iraq and from December 16 to 19 1998, US and UK aircraft bombed military and government targets in Iraq in Operation Desert Fox. It was widely understood that the Clinton administration intended Operation Desert Fox to be not merely a campaign of punishment for Iraq’s failure to cooperate but also to weaken the regime in advance of orchestrated efforts to cause regime change. In that respect, Clinton administration policy was ineffective.

As a result of Iraq’s barring inspectors from the country, UNSCOM inspections of Iraq’s WMD effectively came to an end and in March 1999, the UN concluded that the UNSCOM mandate should end. In December 1999, the UN passed UN Security Council Resolution 1284, setting up UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission), headed by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, which was to identify the remaining WMD arsenals in Iraq. Because UNMOVIC was banned from Iraq, the world had to rely on indirect evidence, most of which turned out to be false or inaccurate. Iraq policy during the remainder of the Clinton presidency was marked by a return to the containment regime that existed before Operation Desert Fox, but now without the benefit of direct intelligence.

Policy before 9/11 Attacks
In the early days of the Bush administration, President George W. Bush expressed dissatisfaction with his predecessor’s foreign policy, in particular with regard to Iraq, which he considered weak and half-hearted. Interestingly, the main thrust of Bush criticism was that President Clinton had been too widely engaged in too many conflicts, acting as the “world’s policeman.” In the end, President Bush believed Clinton had lacked the necessary resolve to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for his failure to comply with UN resolutions. Bush also questioned America’s membership in NATO and involvement in UN diplomacy, which led some to believe he was moving towards a more isolationist view of foreign policy.

At the same time, Bush continued to favor executing the policy President Clinton had approved but not acted on: to actively proceed to effect regime change in Iraq. In January 2002, Time Magazine reported that since President Bush took office he had been grumbling about finishing the job his father started.

On February 16, 2001 a number of US and UK warplanes attacked Baghdad, nearly two years before the declaration of war. .

Iraqi WMD and the War on Terror
The attacks of September 11, 2001 shaped the policies of the Bush administration towards Iraq. President Bush saw them as confirmation of his beliefs that the international community’s failure to enforce compliance with UN resolution and America’s irresolute foreign policy had emboldened rogue states and international terrorist groups. Because Iraq was known to have had and used WMD in the past and because Iraq had blocked UN supervision of the destruction of its WMD, there remained great uncertainty about Iraq’s WMD arsenal. The Bush administration made Iraq of central importance to its national security policy. Combined with his isolationist foreign policy beliefs, President Bush started to formulate what has become known as the Bush Doctrine. The doctrine is most fully expressed in the administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in September 2002. In it, the President states:

We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by (…) direct and continuous action using all the elements of national and international power. Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or their precursors.

The administration included Iraq in a series of states it considered acutely dangerous to world peace. In his 2002 State of the Union President Bush called Iraq part of an “axis of evil” together with Iran and North Korea. In this address the president also claimed the right to wage a preventative war. Early in 2002, the administration began pressuring Iraq as well as the international community on greater compliance by Iraq with UN resolutions.

The Niger Uranium Forgeries
In February 2002, as a result of the discovery of classified documents initially revealed by Italian intelligence in October 2001, the Pentagon sent Marine General Carlton W. Fulford, Jr. to Niger to investigate the claim that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium to revamp its nuclear WMD program. That same month, the CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV to Niger in February 2002. General Fulford and Ambassador Wilson interviewed several high-ranking Niger government officials. Neither found any evidence for the sale; Mr. Wilson concluded that the claim was “unequivocally wrong.”

There was disagreement about the findings of Mr. Wilson’s report within the intelligence community. CIA analysts believed the report confirmed reports about an Iraq-Niger uranium deal, partly because Mr. Wilson’s report included a comment that an Iraqi envoy had visited the African country in 1999. However, State Department analysts decided that Niger would be unwilling or incapable of supplying Iraq with any uranium. As a result of these conflicting intelligence analyses, the Bush administration remained suspicious and continued to work from the assumption that Saddam Hussein was actively trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Because of internal disorganization, the CIA failed to obtain copies of the original classified documents, after they were finally made available to American intelligence in October 2002, and ignored warnings from State Department analysts about problems with the documents. The CIA also failed to check the the president’s 2003 State of the Union for factual errors. Consequently, the address included the infamous “sixteen words” that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It was not until March 2003 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed with conclusive proof that the documents at the basis of the allegations were forgeries. However, the British government claimed it had evidence to the same effect independent of these documents, but had promised the source not to reveal its identity.

Resumption of Weapons Inspections in 2002
The continued belief that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons led the Bush administration to increase diplomatic pressure on the Iraqi regime. During a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 12, 2002, President Bush outlined a long list of complaints against the Iraqi government. This included active support and harboring of terrorists (among them members of al Qaeda who had fled from Afghanistan after the US invaded that country), continued development of prohibited missiles, diverting funds from the UN “Oil for Food” program to purchase weapons, and violation of several UN resolutions by refusing to be open about its WMD arsenal. On November 8, 2002, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1441 which declared Iraq in material breach of the 1991 ceasefire agreement and demanded Iraq fully comply with its disarmament obligations. As a result, Iraq agreed to let UNMOVIC weapons inspectors, headed by Hans Blix, back into the country.

Planning phase
Detailed planning, at the direction of President George W. Bush to the commander of United States Central Command, Tommy Franks, began while active combat was ongoing in Afghanistan. At the time, GEN Eric Shinseki, then Chief of Staff of the Army, testified to Congress that the number of troops approved by Rumsfeld was inadequate. Shinseki, however, was not in the chain of command for operational deployment, although he was the senior officer of the United States Army.

A number of retired generals have been highly critical of the plan, focused especially on what they considered the unrealistic goals of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They include Paul Eaton, who headed training of the Iraqi military in 2003-2004; formal chiefs of United States Central Command (Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar); Gregory Newbold, Director of the Joint staff from 2000 to 2002; John Riggs, a planner who had criticized personnel levels, in public, while on duty; division commanders Charles Swannack and John Baptiste.

First military actions
Air attacks began at 5:34 AM (local time) on March 19, 2003, with carrier aircraft and cruise missiles from ships in international waters. There were additional F-117 Nighthawk stealth aircraft flying from undisclosed bases; while it can be mid-air refueled, it would likely have launched from a base relatively near Iraq. Special operations forces were already operating in Iraq.

Some of the air strikes targeted Saddam Hussein personally. The first ground combat took at 3:57 PM, but south of the Iraqi border, between Iraqi vehicles and U.S. Marine Corps reconnaissance vehicles. Marines began the actual attacks with artillery fire in the late afternoon, preceding the border crossing by the 1st Marine Division under I Marine Expeditionary Force. The Division cooperated closely with 1 Armored Division (U.K.) and the Army's 3d Infantry Division (U.S.)

Lead Marine units crossed the Kuwait-Iraq border and began an intensive attack on Safwan Hill, in Iraq just north of the border.

LTG David McKiernan was the primary ground commander, as Land Component Commander of United States Central Command. He had complained that he did not have enough troops for security after the combat phase, and may have been reassigned due to his disagreements with Rumsfeld.

Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, or Occupation, depending on perspective
The headquarters for foreign military units in Iraq is Multi-national Force-Iraq (MNF-I). On an overall basis, it reports to the United States Central Command, which also commands the U.S. troops in MNF-I. Other units report to their home nations, although there are a number of non-US commanders from the MNF-I Deputy Commanding General, and Australian, British and Polish commanders at division level.