The Invasion of Iraq

Worst Decision

1

The Invasion of Iraq

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Introduction

The September 11, 2001, attacks heightened fears in the United States that Iraq might give terrorists weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the United Nations had pressed Iraq to dismantle its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs after the 1991 Gulf War, President George W. Bush argued that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had continued to pursue them. The UN Security Council threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” in late 2002 if it failed to cooperate with weapons inspections, but it declined to authorize an invasion. The United States responded by organizing a “coalition of the willing” to oust Hussein. Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003, and quickly overran Iraqi forces. However, no evidence of any active Iraqi WMD programs was found. The United States became embroiled in a bloody war of occupation that lasted eight years and cost it dearly, damaging its global reputation and empowering anti-American forces throughout the Middle East and worldwide. SHAFR historians ranked the invasion of Iraq as the worst U.S. foreign policy decision.

The 1991 Gulf War

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was the second war between the two countries in a dozen years. In August 1990, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Although the United States had aided Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, President George H.W. Bush vowed to liberate Kuwait. Hussein refused to back down in the face of UN sanctions. The United States responded by leading a multinational, UN-authorized force that drove Iraq from Kuwait in February 1991. Despite an overwhelming battlefield victory, Bush refused to go beyond his mandate and march on Baghdad.

Hussein’s continued hold on power guaranteed more confrontation. The United States established no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq to limit his ability to persecute Iraqi minority groups. The United Nations sent weapons inspectors to uncover Iraq’s remaining WMD programs, but Iraq hindered their work. The inspectors left Iraq in 1998 shortly before the United States led air strikes to destroy Iraqi military facilities. That same year, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made it official U.S. policy to remove Hussein from power.

U.S. Marines disembark from a CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter during the 1991 Gulf War. Courtesy of the United States Air Force/Tech. Sgt. H. H. Deffner.

September 11 and the “Axis of Evil”

The September 11, 2001 attacks stunned the United States. Several of the younger Bush’s senior advisers suspected that Iraq had orchestrated the attack. Bush shared that belief, directing his chief counterterrorism adviser on September 12 to “see if Saddam did this.” The next day he told his national security team, “I believe Iraq was involved.” The U.S. intelligence community found no evidence that Iraq had aided al-Qaeda, the group that had carried out the attacks, in any way. That finding, however, did not shake the Bush administration’s conviction that Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed a singular threat to the United States.

In the remaining months of 2001, Bush focused on completing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which began that October. By December, U.S. forces had driven the Taliban government, which had harbored al-Qaeda, from power. On January 29, 2002, in his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, Bush turned his sights to Iraq. He argued that it “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror” and that it, along with Iran and North Korea, constituted “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” He vowed that he would “not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

View of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York, September 11, 2001. REUTERS/Sean Adair.

President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil Speech,” January 29, 2002

The One Percent Doctrine

Underlying Bush’s focus on the purported Iraq threat was the conviction that 9/11 had shown that U.S. power alone would not deter terrorists and so-called rogue states like Iraq. As a result, the burden of risk had shifted; the United States needed to proactively identify and neutralize threats. Vice President Dick Cheney remarked in November 2001 that “if there’s a 1 percent chance” of countries providing terrorists with nuclear weapons, “we have to treat it as a certainty.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had mentored Cheney earlier in his career, shared the vice president’s conviction that the United States could no longer afford to tolerate even small risks.

The One Percent Doctrine shaped Bush’s June 2002 commencement address at West Point. He argued that the United States must “confront the worst threats before they emerge” and “be ready for preemptive action.” The National Security Strategy, released three months later, enshrined preemption in policy. The strategy defined preemption broadly, however, making it less about thwarting imminent attack—the traditional definition of preemption—than about preventing threats from emerging. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned that same month that “we don’t want the smoking gun” of Iraq’s WMD programs “to be a mushroom cloud.” Waiting for proof was costly—and deadly.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld talk at the Pentagon, 2002. David Hume Kennerly/Getty.

Building Support for War

By spring 2002, Bush had decided on a showdown with Iraq. His advisers disagreed, however, over how to proceed. Secretary of State Colin Powell favored seeking a new UN mandate for robust weapons inspections. Cheney dismissed that as a trap; Iraq would do just enough to prevent an attack but not enough to end its WMD programs. Bush decided to take Powell’s route to Cheney’s goal. On September 12, he told the UN General Assembly that if the United Nations did not compel Iraq to accept intrusive weapons inspections, “action will be unavoidable.”

Bush’s speech partially sought to defuse potential domestic opposition to a war. Polls showed that most Americans believed Iraq had nuclear weapons and favored using military force to oust Hussein. However, prominent Republicans had begun criticizing the march to war, especially in the absence of UN support. Bush’s willingness to go to the United Nations, coupled with a coordinated administration effort to highlight the dangers of waiting, quieted the critics at home. The House of Representatives voted 396 to 133 on October 10 to authorize the use of force; the Senate followed suit by a vote of 77 to 23. The resolution left it to Bush to decide whether and when to go to war.

The Battle at the United Nations

Bush faced a tougher time persuading the UN Security Council to act on Iraq. Many countries believed that he would use any resolution as a justification for war rather than as a way to avoid it. After eight weeks of intense negotiations, the Security Council approved Resolution 1441, which mandated the inspections that Bush demanded. However, it omitted his demand that countries be authorized to use force if Baghdad refused to fully comply, which it did. The resolution only threatened “serious consequences.”

In early 2003, Bush called for a special session of the UN Security Council to act on “Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world.” On February 5, Powell, the most widely respected of Bush’s advisors, presented what he claimed was evidence that Iraq was pursuing clandestine WMD programs and urged the world to act. Three weeks later, the United States, joined by Britain and Spain, introduced a Security Council resolution declaring that Iraq hadn’t met its obligations. The resolution failed to pass, however. Even traditional U.S. allies like France and Germany refused to support it.

Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Hussein refused to back down in the face of U.S. threats to topple his regime by force. Bush then made good on his threat. On the night of March 19, 2003, he announced in a nationwide address from the Oval Office that Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun. In the absence of a UN Security Council authorization, the Bush administration had assembled a multinational “coalition of the willing” to force Hussein from power.

The United States provided the bulk of the invasion force, with Britain (45,000 troops), Australia (2,000), and Poland (200) also providing combat troops. Three dozen other countries provided troops to manage support activities after Hussein’s government fell. U.S. dominance of the skies over Iraq and the coalition’s far superior weaponry enabled the U.S.-led forces to quickly defeat the Iraqi military. Baghdad fell on April 9, and with it, the Iraqi government. Hussein fled into hiding but was captured in December 2003. He was executed by the new Iraqi government in December 2006.

 

Statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Firdos Square in Baghdad after U.S. forces took the city. April 9, 2003. U.S. Military Photograph

“Mission Accomplished”

On May 1, 2003, Bush spoke to the nation from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” He declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and that the country’s liberation constituted “a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.” Yet, even as Bush was declaring victory, U.S. forces in Iraq were coming up empty in their search for Iraqi WMDs. Over the next two years, inspectors scoured Iraq for evidence that it possessed chemical or biological weapons, or had an active nuclear weapons program. They found none. A presidential commission concluded in 2005 that the Bush administration had been “dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgment about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Hussein hid the fact he had disbanded Iraq’s WMD programs because he feared that admitting that he had abandoned his nuclear ambitions would embolden his enemies to attack.

President George W. Bush speaks about the Iraq War on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003. National Archives.

The Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq

Historians today debate whether the United States went to war based on a sincere but mistaken judgment that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon program, an intent to intimidate potential state and non-state challengers in the wake of 9/11, a desire to finish what the elder President Bush left unfinished, or a naïve belief that U.S. military power could remake the Middle East for the better. Even some members of the Bush administration say they saw no clear reason for war; most senior officials agreed that Hussein had to go but offered different justifications for his ouster. Whatever the ultimate reason for the war, its consequences were undeniable. The United States became embroiled in a military occupation of Iraq that lasted eight years. Efforts to stop a brutal insurgency left roughly 4,500 U.S. troops, more than 300 other coalition forces, and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead. The financial cost of the war and occupation totaled $3 trillion. By the time U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the United States had little to show for its pursuit of regime change.

What Historians Say

  • Christopher McKnight Nichols

    Christopher McKnight Nichols

    The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an unmitigated disaster from conception to withdrawal, sparking a downward turn in the region, generating enhanced anti-Americanism, and in the United States generating ill-will and pushback as well as a tremendous cost in human and financial terms that remains an albatross around the United States’ neck in foreign and domestic policy and politics.
    Wayne Woodrow “Woody” Hayes Chair in National Security Studies and Professor of History, The Ohio State University
  • Kimber Quinney

    Kimber Quinney

    If the United States has sought to create stability (in the wider world, let alone the Middle East,) that single decision [the invasion of Iraq] reversed decades in one fell swoop. It was not merely harmful to the reputation and national strength of the United States, of course. The invasion of Iraq opened the door and rolled out the red carpet to continuing human suffering in this century.
    Professor of History, California State University San Marcos

  • Adriane Lentz-Smith

    The invasion of Iraq was morally wrong, tactically stupid, and has had a destabilizing effect on 21st-century politics ever since: it has distorted the budgetary environment, had devastating effects on the health and morale of the all-volunteer force and its veterans, and helped nurture paramilitary extremism both in foreign countries and domestically. It was a self-inflicted wound.
    Associate Professor of History, Duke University

  • Sally Burt

    The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not justified and cost the United States a lot in terms of being bogged down in a decades long conflict with little to show for it in the end and at the expense of having more options to address China's rise in the Pacific sooner.
    Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales

National Security Archive, GWU

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