Iraq Vietnam War



Iraq Vietnam War

Iraq War

The Iraq War is an armed conflict that began in 2003 with a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to remove the regime of President Saddam Hussein. It became a large-scale campaign to establish a new Iraqi political order in the midst of terrorism, insurgency, and civil war. It is generally identified as a component campaign of the “global war on terror” that President George W. Bush initiated after the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. The U.S. combat role ended in September 2010, and a full withdrawal of American troops is mandated by the end of 2011, according to an agreement between the United States and the Iraqi government (Allawi, 2007).

Origins of the War

The primary case for war was Iraq's continued flouting of UN resolutions requiring it to submit to inspections of its dismantled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities. The Bush administration pressed for enforcement of these resolutions as well as a new one explicitly authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not comply. U.S. and British intelligence reports emphasized Iraq's WMD capabilities, even though evidence was lacking: the reports largely assumed that Iraq's capacity to produce these weapons had not been affected by the years of sanctions and periodic bombings since 1998. The U.S. and British governments seemed interested in playing up fears about Iraqi capabilities as much as possible, and they resisted dissenting opinions that these were overstated. In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the U.S. case against Iraq using this intelligence, much of which was subsequently found to have been false. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, acknowledged that Iraq was being less than fully cooperative, but he noted that his inspectors had found no evidence of “proscribed activities” in their final rounds of inspections (Baker, 2006).

Yet the Bush administration's approach to generating American public support for a confrontation with Iraq also relied on other justifications. One was the false argument that Iraq had played a role in the September 11 attacks. There was little hard evidence to support this argument, other than an intelligence report of uncertain accuracy about a meeting in Prague between the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, and an Iraqi intelligence agent. Nonetheless, President Bush and other officials continually conflated the threat posed by al Qaeda with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, generally invoking the prospect that ...