2003 invasion of Iraq
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 20 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations. The invasion was conducted by a U.S.-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland.
According to U.S. president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair, the coalition aimed "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction , to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people"; however, just before the start of the invasion, a UN inspection team led by Hans Blix found no evidence of the existence of WMDs. According to Blair, the trigger was Iraq's failure to take a "final opportunity" to disarm itself of alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that U.S. and British officials called an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. The invasion was strongly opposed by some long-standing U.S. allies, including the governments of Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand. In September 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal under international law and said it was a breach of the UN Charter. On 15 February 2003, a month before the invasion, there were worldwide protests against the anticipated invasion of Iraq, including a rally of three million people in Rome which the Guinness World Records listed as the largest-ever anti-war rally.
The invasion was preceded by an airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad on 20 March 2003. The following day, coalition forces launched an incursion into Basra Governorate from their massing point close to the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border. While special forces launched an amphibious assault from the Persian Gulf to secure Basra and the surrounding petroleum fields, the main invasion army moved into southern Iraq, occupying the region and engaging in the Battle of Nasiriyah on 23 March. Massive air strikes across the country and against Iraqi command and control threw the defending army into chaos and prevented an effective resistance. On 26 March, the 173rd Airborne Brigade was airdropped near the northern city of Kirkuk, where they joined forces with Kurdish rebels and fought several actions against the Iraqi Army, to secure the northern part of the country.
The main body of coalition forces continued their drive into the heart of Iraq and were met with little resistance. Most of the Iraqi military was quickly defeated. On 9 April 2003, 22 days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. Other operations included the capture and occupation of Kirkuk on 10 April and the attack on and capture of Tikrit on 15 April. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi central leadership went into hiding as the coalition forces completed the occupation of the country. On 1 May, U.S. president George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech. This declaration ended the invasion period of the Iraq War and began the period of military occupation. Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces on 13 December 2003.
Prelude to the invasion
Pre-9/11
Hostilities of the Gulf War were suspended on 28 February 1991, with a cease-fire negotiated between the UN coalition and Iraq. The U.S. and its allies tried to keep Saddam in check with military actions such as Operation Southern Watch, which was conducted by Joint Task Force Southwest Asia with the mission of monitoring and controlling airspace south of the 32nd Parallel as well as using economic sanctions. It was revealed that a biological weapons program in Iraq had begun in the early 1980s with help from the U.S. and Europe who were unaware of Iraq's intentions, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. Details of the BW program—along with a chemical weapons program—surfaced after the Gulf War following investigations conducted by the United Nations Special Commission which had been charged with the post-war disarmament of Saddam's Iraq. The investigation concluded that the program had not continued after the war. The U.S. and its allies then maintained a policy of "containment" towards Iraq. This policy involved numerous economic sanctions by the UN Security Council; the enforcement of Iraqi no-fly zones declared by the U.S. and the UK to protect the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan and Shias in the south from aerial attacks by the Iraqi government; and ongoing inspections. Iraqi military helicopters and planes regularly contested the no-fly zones.In October 1998, removing the Iraqi government became official U.S. foreign policy with enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act. Enacted following the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors the preceding August, the act provided $97 million for Iraqi "democratic opposition organizations" to "establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq." This legislation contrasted with the terms set out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which focused on weapons and weapons programs and made no mention of regime change. One month after the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, the U.S. and UK launched a bombardment campaign of Iraq called Operation Desert Fox. The campaign's express rationale was to hamper Saddam Hussein's government's ability to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but U.S. intelligence personnel also hoped it would help weaken Saddam's grip on power.
File:F-16s Southern Watch.jpg|thumb|Two US F-16 Fighting Falcons prepare to depart Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia for a patrol as part of Operation Southern Watch, 2000.
With the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000, the U.S. moved towards a more aggressive policy toward Iraq. The Republican Party's campaign platform in the 2000 election called for "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act as "a starting point" in a plan to "remove" Saddam. After leaving the George W. Bush administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that an attack on Iraq had been planned since Bush's inauguration and that the first United States National Security Council meeting involved discussion of an invasion. O'Neill later backtracked, saying that these discussions were part of a continuation of foreign policy first put into place by the Clinton administration. Despite the Bush administration's stated interest in invading Iraq, little formal movement towards an invasion occurred until the 11 September attacks.
9/11 and immediate response
On the morning of 11 September 2001, the Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda executed four coordinated attacks against the United States utilizing hijacked commercial jet airliners to crash into major symbols of American economic and military power. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, while more than 6,000 were injured. National Security Agency intercept data available by midday of the 11th pointed to al-Qaeda's culpability in the attacks.By mid-afternoon however, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. According to aides who were with him in the National Military Command Center on that day, Rumsfeld asked for: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL". According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "Rumsfeld later explained that at the time, he had been considering either one of them, or perhaps someone else, as the responsible party."
On the evening of 12 September, President Bush ordered White House counter-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to investigate possible Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Shocked by the sophistication of the attacks, the administration wondered whether a state sponsor was involved. Clarke's office issued a memo on 18 September that noted wide ideological gaps between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that only weak anecdotal evidence linked the two. Similarly, a 21 September President's Daily Brief indicated that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks and there was "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." The PDB wrote off the few contacts that existed between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda as attempts to monitor the group, not work with it.
However, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed skepticism toward's the CIA's intelligence. They questioned whether the CIA were competent enough to produce accurate information as the agency underestimated threats and failed to accurately predict events such as the Iranian Revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They instead preferred outside analysis, of which information was supplied by the Iraqi National Congress as well as unvetted pieces of intelligence. This information alleged that a highly secretive relationship existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda from 1992, specifically through a series of meetings reportedly involving the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The rationale for invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 has been widely questioned, as there was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
On 20 September 2001, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, and announced his new "war on terror". This announcement was accompanied by the doctrine of "pre-emptive" military action, later termed the Bush Doctrine. On 21 November, Bush spoke with Rumsfeld and instructed him to conduct a confidential review of OPLAN 1003, the war plan for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks, the commander of US Central Command, on 27 November to go over the plans. A record of the meeting includes the question "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a US–Iraq War. Some Bush advisers favored an immediate invasion of Iraq, while others advocated building an international coalition and obtaining United Nations authorization. Bush eventually decided to seek UN authorization, while still reserving the option of invading without it.
General David Petraeus recalled in an interview his experience during the time before the invasion, stating that "When we were getting ready for what became the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing wisdom was that we were going to have a long, hard fight to Baghdad, and it was really going to be hard to take Baghdad. The road to deployment, which was a very compressed road for the 101st Airborne Division, started with a seminar on military operations in urban terrain, because that was viewed as the decisive event in the takedown of the regime in Iraq — that and finding and destroying the weapons of mass destruction."