The Invasion of Iraq

MAR 20 2003 · 12:00

U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad, 9 April 2003. Place: Iraq; ground assault from Kuwait, naval and air support across the Persian Gulf Figures: George W. Bush, US president · Tony Blair, British prime minister · Saddam Hussein, Iraqi president (captured December 2003, executed December 2006) · Hans Blix, UNMOVIC chief inspector · Colin Powell, US secretary of state · Dominique de Villepin, French foreign minister The Case That Was Not There On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell addresses the UN Security Council with vials, satellite photographs, and intercepts, presenting the case that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction and is reconstituting a nuclear program. The presentation is the centerpiece of the US public diplomacy for war. Powell later, after leaving office, calls it a blot on his record. France, Germany, and Russia indicate they will not support a second resolution authorizing force. The US and UK abandon the attempt at Security Council cover and proceed without it. UN weapons inspectors leave Iraq on 18 March; the air campaign begins on 20 March; the ground invasion follows within hours. Baghdad falls on 9 April. The statue of Saddam in Firdos Square is pulled down by a US Marine recovery vehicle with a small Iraqi crowd present (a tableau, much-reproduced at the time, that later inquiries showed had been managed at least in part by US press handlers). Saddam's regime is dismantled within weeks. No weapons of mass destruction stockpiles are found. The Duelfer Report of 2004 confirms there were none to find. What the War Cost the System The Coalition Provisional Authority dissolves the Iraqi army and the Baath Party in May 2003, decisions widely understood within the year as the engine of the insurgency that follows. The war's direct US military fatalities reach approximately 4,500; Iraqi civilian deaths estimated by Iraq Body Count exceed 200,000, with academic estimates including indirect deaths running considerably higher. The US occupation does not end until December 2011; ISIS rises in 2013 in the territorial and institutional vacuum the invasion produced; US troops return in 2014. The 2003 war is the clearest Westphalian violation by the system's leading power since 1945 (see [[un-charter-1945]]). The invasion is conducted without Security Council authorization, on a pretext later established as false, against a state that had not attacked the invading powers. Kofi Annan calls the war illegal from the UN podium in 2004. The unipolar moment's strongest claim, that the lead state would underwrite the liberal order rather than disregard it, is the war's most expensive casualty. The 2008 financial crisis and the Russian return to revisionism both happen against an international backdrop in which the US claim to Video: APTN footage of the opening of the air campaign over Baghdad, 21 March 2003. Explosions over the skyline, columns of smoke, and the presidential palace on fire as Operation Iraqi Freedom begins.