Overview

The official reason for invading Iraq was to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which President Bush and many other world leaders believed the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was in the process of developing.

UN weapons inspectors wear protective clothing while searching for parts of biological and chemical missile warheads - Baghdad, Iraq, June 1998
© 1998 Getty Images, Inc.

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and the Iraqi civilians he suspected of helping them. Years of United Nations (UN) inspections—initiated in 1991 after Saddam had provoked another war by invading Kuwait—failed to verify that Iraq had destroyed these WMD or abandoned attempts to manufacture new ones.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, refocused attention on Iraqi WMD, as world leaders began to worry about the possible intersection of terrorism and WMD. At the heart of their fears lay three frightening propositions:

• There are terrorists who strive to kill as many people as possible.
• Such terrorists would probably use WMD if they had them.
• Saddam Hussein—a brutal tyrant with known interests in WMD—might one day pass WMD on to these terrorists.

In the United States, in particular, this doomsday scenario appears to have translated into a willingness to support a new kind of war—often called preemptive—in which countries do not wait to be attacked but, instead, use military force to eliminate perceived threats from their enemies. Former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice summed up the policy with regard to Iraq when she said that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”¹

Other world leaders agreed. On November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution requiring Iraq to readmit the weapons inspectors. Three months of inspections produced no hard evidence of WMD. However, the failure of Iraqi officials and scientists to cooperate fully allowed the United States and the United Kingdom (UK) to declare that Iraq had not taken what the resolution had called a “final opportunity” to disarm.

U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell presented intelligence to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, alleging, among other things, that Iraq was continuing to conceal its banned weapons programs. Shortly after Powell’s presentation, the inspections were abandoned, and U.S. and UK forces prepared for war.

According to Secretary Powell, this satellite image showed a factory where ricin, a deadly toxin, was produced - UN Security Council, New York, February 5, 2003
© 2003 Getty Images, Inc.

Yes. In the 1990s, a group of leading conservatives, often referred to as “neo-cons,” came together to protest what they regarded as fatal weaknesses in President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy. As part of an advocacy organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), influential figures like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush argued that U.S. foreign policy had gone “adrift” and pressed the case for a return to “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”²

Many PNAC members had bitterly opposed the decision to leave Saddam in power in 1991 after a multinational force had expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait. In 1998, they sent a letter to President Clinton arguing that Saddam’s continuing rule threatened the world’s oil supply as well as the security of Israel and other U.S. allies in the region. The authors urged Clinton to remove the Iraqi leader by undertaking “military action” if necessary.³

Clinton—his presidency rocked by revelations of an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky—refused to authorize war with Iraq. But, with impeachment proceedings looming, he did make one concession to the neo-cons: on October 31, 1998, he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy.

Despite mounting pressure from influential neo-cons, there was little popular support in the United States for translating the new policy into action. The disastrous U.S. campaign in Somalia a few years earlier had helped revive feelings of isolationism among the American people and practically ensured that no U.S. president would go to war in the absence of a clear threat to U.S. security.

Things changed after George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election. Even more significant than putting Bush in the Oval Office was putting important PNAC members into key positions. With Cheney as vice president and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as the numbers one and two at the Pentagon, persuasive men intent on toppling Saddam’s regime surrounded the president; 9/11 gave them their chance.

In the dark days following September 11, 2001, key figures in and outside the administration were blaming Saddam and arguing for making Iraq a central front in the president’s newly declared War on Terror. On September 13, for example, in what many observers regarded as a reference to Iraq, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz spoke openly of “ending states who sponsor terrorism.” A week later, PNAC wrote a letter to President Bush, calling for “a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” The neo-cons’ efforts paid off; it was—according to a wealth of evidence—shortly after 9/11 that President Bush decided to go to war in Iraq.

President Bush hears the news that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center - Sarasota, Florida, September 11, 2001
© 2001 Getty Images, Inc.

Yes. Many people on the left and right argued for war on humanitarian grounds. For them, the hundreds of thousands of murders Saddam had ordered since becoming Iraq’s president in 1979 didn’t merely justify using force to remove him; it required it.

Between 1988 and 1989, Saddam ordered the deaths of about 100,000 Kurds—Iraqi citizens based in the north of the country—because he considered them a threat. Then, in 1991, after aborted rebellions in the south and north of the country, Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, ordered the murder of tens of thousands of Shi‘i Muslims and thousands more Kurds.

These already lofty numbers don’t include the Iraqi soldiers and civilians who were killed in the two major wars Saddam launched in the 1980s and 1990s. The first was the incredibly bloody, eight-year war with Iran, which Saddam provoked in 1980 by sending Iraqi soldiers into Iran to back up a spurious claim to a piece of Iranian territory. The second, the 1991 Gulf war, happened because Saddam sent Iraqi soldiers into Kuwait to assert an equally spurious territorial claim. Throw these wars into the mix and the number of Iraqi dead for which Saddam is responsible exceeds a million. Add the Iranian and Kuwaiti dead and that number almost doubles.

Yes. The worst and most brutal of Iraq’s leaders, Saddam Hussein, was not unique in resorting to violence. Indeed, every Iraqi ruler dating back to the British colonizers in the 1920s and 1930s had used some measure of violence to control the population.

The problem with Iraq—and the challenge facing its leaders—has always been that it’s not a real country. Or, more accurately, it’s a country whose borders were created more or less arbitrarily by British authorities in the 1920s. In charge of much of the Gulf region at the time, the British cobbled together three historically separate provinces and made them one country.

Iraq

Tragically for Iraq, the provinces were inhabited by people, almost all Muslims, who did not feel like they belonged together:

• Baghdad: the central part of modern Iraq, containing its capital city, was inhabited mostly by Sunni Muslims but also by Shi‘i Muslims and some Jews
• Basra: the southern part of the country was inhabited mostly by Shi‘i Muslims, Iraq’s largest religious group
• Mosul: the northern region was inhabited mostly by Kurds, who, although Sunni Muslims, felt little or no kinship with the Sunni Arabs of Baghdad

A key element in the British strategy for maintaining order in Iraq was to buy the loyalty of the minority Sunnis and allow—and often help—them to ruthlessly stamp out any dissent from the Shi‘is and Kurds. Long after the British relinquished sovereignty of Iraq in 1932, the Sunnis used violence to retain their hold on the Iraqi government and military. This dynamic lasted until Saddam was removed from power in 2003. With violence still prevalent in Iraq, an Iraqi government has yet to demonstrate that the country can be governed by debate and compromise instead of brutality and repression.

British armored cars patrol in Iraq - 1922
© Getty Images, Inc.

It is difficult to answer this question with certainty and precision. In very general terms, though, here are the three groups who, for different reasons, are carrying out most of the violence:

• Coalition forces: They consist of about 140,000 American and a few thousand more, mostly British, troops. Many other countries have contributed troops too, but in relatively small numbers and usually not for long.
• Insurgents: They are mostly Iraqi Sunnis, many of whom have ties to Saddam Hussein’s old party, the Ba‘ath. Their numbers are unknown but have been consistently estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000.
• Sunni and Shi‘i extremists: They are mostly Iraqis who refuse to live peacefully with compatriots who don’t fully share their religious views. The ranks of the Sunni extremists include a contested number al-Qa‘ida-linked militants. Among the Shi‘i extremists are paramilitaries answering to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and death squads reportedly operating within the Iraqi security forces.

The coalition forces have occupied Iraq since March 2003. They won the conventional war quickly and then remained in Iraq to help prepare the country for democratic rule. But in and around the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, U.S. troops almost immediately lost the support of the Iraqi people by failing to stop extensive looting or restore electricity, water, and other basic amenities. In late April, the troops further alienated the Iraqis by shooting at civilians protesting the stationing of a U.S. army unit in a local school.

Amidst the anger and chaos, guerrilla fighters—the insurgents—emerged and gained strength. Because the insurgents did not fight in the open or issue concrete demands, it wasn’t initially obvious what they wanted. But their targets, coupled with occasional internet statements, soon made clear that they were trying to do two things:

• force U.S. troops to leave Iraq
• prevent the transfer of power from themselves, Ba‘athists in particular and Sunnis in general, to the majority Shi‘is

To achieve their goals, the insurgents targeted coalition troops, UN administrators, and Iraqi politicians and security forces—in short, anyone working to establish a representative democratic system in Iraq. Daily attacks, mainly in the form of roadside bombings and rocket-propelled grenades, were soon counted in the dozens.

At first, these insurgent attacks as well as clashes with coalition troops accounted for most of the violence. The Shi‘is, under the influence of the senior cleric ‘Ali al-Sistani, largely stayed out of the fray. But, as Shi‘i casualties mounted and it emerged that some of the insurgents were working with al-Qa‘ida elements to provoke a religious war inside Iraq, the Shi‘is fought back.

Increasingly, it was the sectarian conflict, indistinguishable from civil war for much of 2006, that accounted for the greatest carnage in Iraq. While attacks on coalition forces leveled out, religiously motivated attacks rose abruptly. Every month, suicide bombers killed hundreds of ordinary Shi‘is, while al-Sadr’s paramilitaries and Shi‘i death squads often operating within or alongside sympathetic security forces executed hundreds of Sunnis.

Moqtada al-Sadr's supporters mark the anniversary of al-Sadr's father's death - Baghdad, November 2006
© 2006 Getty Images, Inc.

Violence started to decline steadily in 2007, as a “surge” of U.S. troops, overseen by commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus, coincided with the “awakening” movement, which saw Sunni insurgents turn their guns on al-Qa‘ida militants, and with a cease-fire called by Moqtada al-Sadr.

This is the million-dollar question, with analysts disagreeing over what would happen if U.S. troops withdrew rapidly and left the Iraqis to fend for themselves.

Opponents of a speedy withdrawal worry about the consequences of removing the powerful U.S. military. After the bombing of a Shi‘i mosque in Samarra early in 2006, Shi‘i neighborhoods were daily rocked by explosions, while the corpses of thousands of Sunni men—many showing signs of torture—showed up in Baghdad morgues. Take U.S. troops off the streets, some analysts predict, and the violence will revert to these horrifying levels.

Proponents of a speedy withdrawal argue that ending the U.S. occupation would remove a key recruitment tool for the insurgents. Particularly after the bloody U.S. incursion into Falluja and the scandal at Abu Ghraib, it has been quite easy for the insurgents to rally Iraqis against the foreign enemy. Bring the troops home, this argument goes, and the insurgents will lose their principal target of hatred, and Iraqis will be forced to sort out their own problems.

Yes. Despite pre-war predictions that the sales of Iraqi oil would cover the country’s reconstruction, the vast majority of the funding is coming from the United States. With the cost of the occupation budgeted at around $200 million per day, the U.S. government—already operating at a substantial deficit—will have to borrow ever-larger amounts of money. At some point, this money will have to be paid back, and U.S. taxpayers will presumably bear the brunt of it.

Emotionally, the war is also taking its toll. On September 16, 2008, the day General Petraeus handed control of U.S. military operations in Iraq to General Raymond Odierno, over four thousand American families were grieving the death of a soldier in Iraq; more have died since then. What’s more, there is reportedly considerable frustration and demoralization among members of the National Guard, who, in their repeated tours of duty in Iraq, have gotten far more than (as an old recruiting slogan put it) the “one weekend a month, two weeks a year” they signed up for.

In practical terms, the tying up of tens of thousands of the National Guard and army reservists has limited the numbers available for serving in other capacities—providing security in other hot spots like Afghanistan, for example, or distributing aid after natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

Outside the United States, especially in predominantly Muslim countries, there is a sense that the attack on Iraq was unprovoked and that the continuing carnage there reflects the indifference of Western leaders and their people to the lives of Muslims. While it is impossible to know the extent to which anger at the Iraq war has motivated individuals to carry out specific terrorist acts, it seems clear that it has had some effect. This is certainly the conclusion reached by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, a government agency, and Chatham House, a respected think tank, in the United Kingdom. It’s also what one of the July 7 London bombers said in an interview with the Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera.

Finally, the continued violence in Iraq has had a corrosive effect on international relations. The continued occupation of Iraq by U.S. troops is complicating efforts at reconciliation between the United States and others that opposed the war from the outset.