Iraq War 2003: The Invasion of Iraq and the Fall of Saddam

The Iraq War began on 20 March 2003, when a coalition led by the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. Baghdad fell within three weeks, but the main justification for the war, Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), proved unfounded, and the occupation gave way to a long insurgency and a sectarian civil war. US forces finally withdrew in December 2011, leaving a deeply changed Iraq and a lasting controversy in the countries that went to war.

Background

Saddam Hussein had ruled Iraq since 1979, leading it into the Iran-Iraq War and then the invasion of Kuwait. After the Gulf War of 1991, the UN Security Council required Iraq to give up all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes and long-range missiles, under the supervision of UN inspectors. Economic sanctions remained in place throughout the 1990s and caused severe hardship for ordinary Iraqis.

Iraq obstructed the inspectors repeatedly, and in December 1998 they were withdrawn before a four-day US and British bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox. In the same year the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, making the removal of Saddam’s regime an official goal of American policy, though not by invasion.

The case for war

The September 11 attacks of 2001 transformed American thinking about risk. The administration of President George W. Bush argued that a hostile regime with weapons of mass destruction might pass them to terrorists. In January 2002 Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil”, and during 2002 the United States and Britain built up forces in the Gulf.

On 8 November 2002 the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq “a final opportunity” to comply with its disarmament obligations. Inspectors returned under Hans Blix of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They found no stockpiles but reported that Iraq’s co-operation was incomplete, and asked for more time.

On 5 February 2003 US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented intelligence to the Security Council on Iraq’s alleged weapons and mobile biological laboratories. Much of it later turned out to be wrong. France, Germany and Russia opposed military action, and the United States and Britain withdrew a draft resolution authorising force when it became clear it would not pass.

Opposition was also strong in public. On 15 February 2003 millions of people marched against the war in cities around the world; estimates for the London march alone range from about 750,000 to 2 million. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair won a House of Commons vote for military action on 18 March 2003 by 412 votes to 149, despite a large rebellion in his own party.

The invasion

On 17 March 2003 Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq. The war began in the early hours of 20 March, Baghdad time, with an air strike on a compound where intelligence suggested Saddam might be. A massive air campaign, publicised in advance as “shock and awe”, followed on 21 March.

The ground invasion, commanded by US General Tommy Franks, was launched from Kuwait. Around 300,000 coalition personnel took part, the great majority American, together with about 45,000 British, some 2,000 Australian and a small number of Polish troops. In the north, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters worked with US special forces.

US Army and Marine units advanced rapidly up the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, meeting resistance from Iraqi regular forces and from irregular Fedayeen fighters at places such as Nasiriyah and Najaf, and slowed by a severe sandstorm. British forces fought for Basra, Iraq’s second city, and took control there in early April. On 5 and 7 April US armoured columns made raids, known as “Thunder Runs”, into Baghdad itself.

On 9 April 2003 central Baghdad fell. That afternoon a crowd of Iraqis, helped by a US Marine armoured recovery vehicle, pulled down the large statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Kirkuk and Mosul fell soon after, and Saddam’s home town of Tikrit was taken on 14 April. On 1 May Bush declared the end of major combat operations in a speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”.

Occupation and insurgency

The collapse of the regime was followed by widespread looting, including at ministries, hospitals and the National Museum of Iraq. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed from May 2003 by the American diplomat Paul Bremer, governed the country. Its first two orders banned senior members of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party from public jobs and dissolved the Iraqi army and security services, leaving hundreds of thousands of armed men unemployed. Many historians see these decisions as major mistakes that fed the coming insurgency.

Attacks on coalition troops grew through the second half of 2003, carried out by former regime loyalists, Sunni Arab nationalists and Islamist militants, including a group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that became al-Qaeda in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole near Tikrit on 13 December 2003. In 2004 photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison caused international outrage, and US Marines fought two major battles for the city of Fallujah, in April and November.

The CPA handed formal sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government on 28 June 2004. Iraqis voted in elections on 30 January 2005, approved a new constitution in October 2005 and elected a full parliament that December. Shia and Kurdish parties dominated the new order, while many Sunni Arabs, who had held power under Saddam, boycotted or rejected it.

Civil war and the surge

On 22 February 2006 a bomb destroyed the golden dome of the al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites of Shia Islam. The attack set off a wave of sectarian killing between Shia militias and Sunni insurgents. At the peak, in late 2006, United Nations figures recorded thousands of civilian deaths a month across the country, and many mixed neighbourhoods of Baghdad were divided by violence and forced displacement. Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in June 2006, and Saddam Hussein was executed on 30 December 2006 after his conviction by an Iraqi tribunal.

In January 2007 Bush announced a “surge” of about 20,000 to 30,000 additional US troops under General David Petraeus, with a new emphasis on protecting the population. At the same time many Sunni tribes in Anbar province, in a movement known as the Awakening, turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with US forces. Violence fell sharply in 2007-2008. A Status of Forces Agreement signed in 2008 set a timetable for withdrawal, and the last US combat troops left Iraq on 18 December 2011.

Weapons of mass destruction

The search for WMD was led by the Iraq Survey Group. Its final report, presented by Charles Duelfer in September 2004, found that Iraq had destroyed its illicit stockpiles in 1991 and had no active nuclear programme. In 2004 a US Senate committee concluded that pre-war intelligence had been seriously flawed. In Britain, the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot reported in July 2016 that the government had gone to war before peaceful options were exhausted, that judgements about Iraq’s weapons were presented with a certainty that was not justified, and that planning for the aftermath was wholly inadequate.

By the numbers

Figures for Iraqi deaths are among the most contested of any modern war. Counts based on media and morgue reports are lower than estimates from household surveys, and the methods of some high surveys have been strongly criticised. Millions of Iraqis were displaced inside the country or fled abroad, especially to Syria and Jordan.

Legacy

The war removed a dictator responsible for the deaths of many thousands of his own people, and Iraq has since held regular competitive elections. Yet it also cost hundreds of thousands of lives, unleashed sectarian conflict and greatly expanded Iran’s influence in Iraq. Remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq regrouped in the Syrian civil war and re-emerged as the Islamic State group, whose rise in 2014 brought US forces back to Iraq.

In the United States and Britain the war damaged public trust in intelligence and in political leaders, and it shaped later debates about intervention in Libya and Syria. The direct US budgetary cost is usually put at around 800 billion dollars, while broader estimates including long-term veterans’ care run into the trillions.

Timeline

• 2002, 8 November: UN Security Council passes Resolution 1441.
• 2003, 15 February: Millions protest against war in cities worldwide.
• 2003, 20 March: The US-led invasion of Iraq begins.
• 2003, 9 April: Baghdad falls; Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square is pulled down.
• 2003, 1 May: Bush declares the end of major combat operations.
• 2003, 13 December: Saddam Hussein is captured near Tikrit.
• 2004, 28 June: Sovereignty is handed to an Iraqi interim government.
• 2006, 22 February: Bombing of the al-Askari Shrine in Samarra sparks sectarian war.
• 2007, January: The US troop surge is announced.
• 2011, 18 December: The last US combat troops leave Iraq.

Why it matters

The Iraq War was one of the defining conflicts of the early twenty-first century. A war fought on the basis of intelligence that proved wrong, and an occupation that was poorly planned, reshaped the Middle East, helped give rise to the Islamic State and left a deep mark on Western politics and on public attitudes to military intervention.