Iraq War. At the end of the
Persian Gulf War of 1991, the administration of President George H. W.
Bush decided to try to topple the regime of Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein by nonmilitary means. President Bill
Clinton continued this policy. Economic sanctions against Iraq, moderated by the
United Nations‐run “oil-for-food” program, impoverished the country, but these measures ironically enriched Hussein, who siphoned off funds from oil sales. A “no-fly zone” established in northern Iraq protected the long‐persecuted Kurds from Hussein's air force. Covert action to unseat Hussein, based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region and elsewhere, however, failed.
Conservative Republicans in the United States demanded a more aggressive approach to overthrowing Hussein and enhancing U.S. power in the Persian Gulf region. Iraq controlled one of the richest oil basins in the world and had, for centuries, been a strategic crossroads. Under pressure, President Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which allocated funds for training and equipping Iraqi opposition forces.
The election of George W. Bush in 2000 brought into the defense establishment a group of Iraq “hawks,” especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy undersecretary Douglas Feith, who had been developing a rationale for direct U.S. military action to overthrow Hussein. After Al Qaeda's attacks of
September 11, 2001 and even before the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in December 2001, these advisers shifted the president's sights to Iraq. Under a new “Bush Doctrine,” the United States assumed the authority to wage “preemptive war” against any force, including any foreign nation that endangered U.S. security.
Arguing that intelligence reports indicated that Iraq possessed ”weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and had ties to Al Qaeda, the Iraq “hawks” called for immediate measures to bring about “regime change.” At the insistence of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the White House asked the UN and other nations to support a military strike to remove Hussein on the claim that Iraq had been avoiding the weapons inspections mandated by the Gulf War settlement of 1991. Influenced by France, Germany, and Russia, however, the UN favored giving weapons inspections another try.
Ignoring the UN, in early 2003 the Bush administration put together a “coalition of the willing” (troops from the U.S. and Great Britain, plus small contingents from Poland, Italy, Spain, and a few other countries). On March 20 it launched an air and ground assault against Iraq. The plan was that the impact from a massive U.S. bombing campaign (a strategy called “shock and awe”) would touch off an insurrection against Hussein; British and U.S. troops would secure oil fields and strategic locations; and Iraqis (perhaps led by exile groups such as Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress) would organize a new pro‐U.S. government. Overriding some projections that estimated at least 300,000 U.S. troops would be needed for such a campaign, General Tommy Franks, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command, led an operation named “Iraqi Freedom” that deployed only one‐third that many forces. On May 1, President Bush proclaimed from the deck of the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln that significant combat in Iraq had ended. This carefully crafted media event quickly rebounded against the President, however, as resistance to the U.S.‐dominated occupation of Iraq expanded.
The United States aimed to create a friendly government and an economic order closely tied to U.S companies in postwar Iraq. On May 11 2003 L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad to direct a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which struggled to administer the country. A multi‐faceted Iraqi insurgency, however, brought rising casualties. Insurgents even began to attack aid workers from the United Nations, the Red Cross, and other international relief agencies. In part, the postwar disorder stemmed from the ethnic, religious, and regional divisions in Iraqi society. Under Hussein, Sunni Arabs who lived in areas around Baghdad had dominated political power. The Shi'a Arabs, a majority of the population who were concentrated in the South, and the northern Kurds, mostly Sunni but non‐Arab, had been persecuted outsiders. They now wanted control. Divisions also emerged between Iraqis who wanted any new government to remain secular (as it had been under Hussein) and those who wanted one grounded on some version of Islamic law. Moreover, anti‐western militants from outside Iraq joined the insurgency. Power struggles among these diverse factions, complicated by the presence of foreign troops who understood little of Iraq's socio‐religious dynamics, threatened to embroil the country in civil war. In December 2003 U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein, hiding in the city of Tikrit, but, contrary to what some had predicted, the insurgency continued.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration faced new problems resulting from “Iraqi Freedom.” Although the Iraq “hawks” had predicted that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the U.S. military action, in the fall of 2003, the president had to ask Congress for $87 billion dollars to fund immediate needs. The lack of international support meant that, unlike in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. taxpayers had to foot the bill in Iraq. The CPA's financial management was so poor (or impossible to carry out) that a later audit estimated that billions of dollars could not be accounted for. Oil revenue remained low; insurgents blew up infrastructure nearly as fast as it could be rebuilt; and unemployment among Iraqis soared, further fuelling the insurgency.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration's public rationale for the war fell apart. It could not document any clear connection between Al Qaeda and Hussein before the war. Moreover, after nearly two years of looking for evidence of WMD, the Iraq Survey Group of CIA‐appointed experts released a 1500 page report (in April 2005), which concluded that Iraq had ended its chemical weapons program in 1991 and possessed no biological or nuclear weapons. One Iraqi defector, code‐named “Curveball,” who was the main source of U.S. claims about Iraq's mobile biological laboratories, turned out to be a fabricator, a suspicion that high CIA officials had known and passed on to high policymakers with no apparent effect. In response, Congress reorganized all of the disparate intelligence‐gathering divisions of the government into a new umbrella agency, and on April 21 2005 John Negroponte was sworn in as the first new Director of National Intelligence.
U.S. troop size also remained an issue. As the insurgency worsened, the Pentagon dispatched greater numbers of Special Forces teams, which carried out specific, secret missions and whose numbers were not formally included in the overall troop size. In addition, private military contractors played a far larger role than in any past conflict. As the occupation continued and official troop size rose to 150,000, the pace of military recruitment at home fell off sharply. In May 2005 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that the Iraq war had stretched the military so thin that it might not be able to meet other threats. One‐by‐one, coalition members began pulling their troops and support cadres out of Iraq, bowing to the unpopularity of the war in their countries. Spain withdrew its troops after a March 2004 bombing attack on Madrid commuter trains killed nearly 200 and injured more than 1,200. By 2005 the war was largely a U.S.‐U.K. effort. Even in Great Britain, widespread popular opposition to the deployment of British troops in Iraq by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair intensified after a July 2005 attack on London's subway system, apparently by Islamic terrorists, left more than 50 dead and many injured.
The nature of the U.S. occupation also became a matter of controversy. Abuse of detained Iraqis became particularly egregious at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, and in the spring of 2004 the U.S. news media published graphic photos of mistreatment. Subsequent trials of lower level military personnel stoked a domestic debate over the use and definition of “torture” and over whether the abuse had stemmed from low‐level “rogue” elements or from a climate of harsh interrogation set at higher levels.
Meanwhile hoping to calm the insurgencies, U.S. policymakers intensified efforts to create a new Iraqi‐run government. In June 2004 the CPA was replaced by an interim authority headed by Dr. Iyad Allawi, former leader of a dissident exile group, the Iraqi National Accord.
The American public was sharply divided over the wisdom of going to war in Iraq. Critics charged the administration with misleading the country into war and shifting the cost to future generations while the current one enjoyed tax cuts. The president's defenders warned that dissent endangered national security. Such disputes came into the presidential election of 2004. Pre‐election surveys indicated that nearly three‐quarters of potential voters reported at least “some” confidence in Bush's ability to protect the nation, one of the few issues on which his approval rate topped 50 per cent. Many voters continued to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Hussein possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and had allied with Al Qaeda before September 11. Bush narrowly defeated his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, by 286 to 251 electoral votes, in large measure because of the President's perceived strength on national security issues.
In January 2005 an election in Iraq chose a 275‐member national assembly charged with establishing an interim government and drafting a federal constitution. The election was held under the tightest security imaginable—thousands were imprisoned and the identities of most of the officials running for office were not known, except by their political affiliation, for fear they would become targets of insurgents. The Sunni population generally boycotted the elections (or were afraid to vote for fear of insurgents' retaliation). Shi'a and Kurds, happy to break Sunni dominance, voted in large numbers. In addition, roughly 250,000 Iraqi expatriates cast absentee ballots. In the spring of 2005, the newly elected assembly (dominated by Shi'a and Kurds) chose Ibrahim al'Jaafari as Prime Minister and struggled to put a cabinet in place.
It was ironic that George W. Bush, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had denounced Democratic attempts at “nation-building” abroad, had undertaken the greatest “nation‐building” challenge in U.S. history. As the war entered its third year, the president made optimistic proclamations about the spread of “freedom” to Iraq, and the U.S. tried to train Iraqi security forces to help maintain order. Still, the insurgency and factional fighting remained virulent, and U.S. commitments of men and money showed no sign of diminishing. By July 2005, the war had claimed the lives of nearly 1,800 U.S. troops (with 13,000 more injured). Estimates of Iraqi civilians killed ranged from 5,000 to 37,000. Costs approached $200 billion, contributing to a severe U.S. government deficit. With Americans in sharp disagreement over how the war had been handled and over whether future gains could be worth such costs and risks, popular support for the war dropped below 40 per cent.
See also
Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with the Middle East.
Bibliography
Bob Woodward , Bush at War, 2003.
Seymour M. Hersh , Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004.
John Keegan , The Iraq War, 2004.
Emily S. Rosenberg
