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 United States–led coalition of mainly American, British, Australian, and Polish troops.
According to US president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair, the coalition aimed to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons—and "free the Iraqi people" by deposing president Saddam Hussein, in turn ending his "support for terrorism". Before the invasion, United Nations (UN) inspectors in Iraq had found no evidence of Iraqi WMDs; US and British officials claimed they were still hidden, and posed an immediate threat to world peace.
The invasion was strongly opposed by some long-standing US allies, including Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand. In 2004, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal under international law, as a breach of the UN Charter. On 15 February 2003, there were worldwide protests against the anticipated invasion of Iraq, including a rally of three million people in Rome which was the largest anti-war rally in history.
The invasion began with 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 occupied southern Iraq, 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. Saddam and the Iraqi central leadership went into hiding, as the coalition forces finished occupying the country. On 1 May, Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in Iraq; this began the occupation phase of the Iraq War, in which coalition forces fought the Iraqi insurgency. Saddam was captured by US forces on 13 December 2003.
Prelude to the invasion
Background
The Gulf War began in 1990, and ended in 1991 with a ceasefire between the United Nations coalition and Iraq. The U.S. and its allies tried to keep Saddam Hussein in check with military actions such as Operation Southern Watch, by monitoring and controlling some Iraqi airspace, as well as using economic sanctions. Violating the Biological Weapons Convention, Iraq's biological weapons (BW) program began in the early 1980s, with help from the U.S. and European countries reportedly unaware of Iraq's intentions. Details of Iraqi biological and chemical weapons program surfaced after the Gulf War, following investigations by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), which had been charged with the post-war disarmament of 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, involving numerous economic sanctions by the UN Security Council (UNSC); 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 1998, regime change in Iraq became official U.S. foreign policy with enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act, enacted following the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors months earlier (some had been accused of spying for the U.S.). 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 UNSC Resolution 687, which focused on weapons and weapons programs and made no mention of regime change. One month later, the U.S. and UK bombed Iraq during Operation Desert Fox, their rationale being to hamper Iraq'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.
With George W. Bush's inauguration in January 2001, the U.S. moved towards a more aggressive policy toward Iraq. The Republican Party's 2000 campaign platform called for the U.S. to "remove" Saddam. After leaving the Bush administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that an attack on Iraq had been planned since Bush's inauguration, and that the first U.S. 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).
September 11 attacks
On the morning of 11 September 2001, the al-Qaeda militant organization, led by Osama bin Laden, committed four coordinated terrorist attacks on the U.S., using hijacked commercial airliners to crash into major symbols of American economic and military power. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Messages intercepted by the National Security Agency during the attacks pointed to al-Qaeda's responsibility for them. By mid-afternoon, however, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. According to aides near him that day, Rumsfeld messaged: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]". 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 12 September, Bush ordered White House counter-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to investigate possible Iraqi involvement in 9/11. 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. A 21 September briefing to Bush indicated that U.S. intelligence had no evidence linking Saddam 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, U.S. vice president Dick Cheney and 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 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the 1991 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 (IIS). The rationale for invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 has been widely questioned, as there was no cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
On 20 September 2001, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress (telecast live to the world), 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 U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), on 27 November to go over the plans. A record of the meeting includes the question "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a U.S.–Iraq War. Some Bush advisers favored an immediate invasion of Iraq, while others advocated building an international coalition and obtaining UN 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."
Diplomatic preparations
While there had been some earlier talk of action against Iraq, the Bush administration waited until September 2002 to call for action, with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card saying, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Bush began formally making his case to the international community for an invasion of Iraq in his 12 September address to the UN General Assembly. Also that day, Benjamin Netanyahu testified before the U.S. Congress, using expert testimony to encourage an invasion, and stating there was "no question" that Saddam was working on WMDs.
The UK agreed with the U.S. actions, while France and Germany were critical of plans to invade Iraq, arguing instead for continued diplomacy and weapons inspections. After considerable debate, the UNSC adopted a compromise resolution, UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized the resumption of weapons inspections and promised "serious consequences" for non-compliance. UNSC members France and Russia made clear that they did not consider these consequences to include the use of force to overthrow the Iraqi government. Both the U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and the UK ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, publicly confirmed this reading of the resolution, assuring that Resolution 1441 provided no "automaticity" or "hidden triggers" for an invasion without further consultation of the UNSC.
Resolution 1441 gave Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" and set up inspections by the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Saddam accepted the resolution on 13 November and inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of UNMOVIC chairman Hans Blix and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei. As of February 2003, the IAEA "found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq"; the IAEA concluded that certain items which could have been used in nuclear enrichment centrifuges, such as aluminum tubes, were in fact intended for other uses. UNMOVIC "did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption" of WMD programs, or significant quantities of proscribed items. UNMOVIC did supervise the destruction of a small number of empty chemical rocket warheads, 50 liters of mustard gas that had been declared by Iraq and sealed by UNSCOM in 1998, and laboratory quantities of a mustard gas precursor, along with about 50 Al-Samoud missiles of a design that Iraq stated did not exceed the permitted 150 km range, but which had traveled up to 183 km in tests. Shortly before the invasion, UNMOVIC stated that it would take "months" to verify Iraqi compliance with resolution 1441.
In October 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Resolution, which authorized the President to "use any means necessary" against Iraq. Americans polled in January 2003 widely favored further diplomacy over an invasion. Later that year, however, Americans began to agree with Bush's plan. The U.S. government engaged in an elaborate domestic public relations campaign to market the war to its citizens. Americans overwhelmingly believed Saddam did have WMDs: 85% said so, even though the inspectors had not uncovered those weapons. Of those who thought Iraq had weapons sequestered somewhere, about half responded that said weapons would not be found in combat. By February 2003, 64% of Americans supported taking military action to remove Saddam from power.
In the 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs". On 5 February, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell addressed the UNSC, continuing U.S. efforts to gain UN authorization for an invasion. His presentation contained a computer-generated image of a "mobile biological weapons laboratory". However, this information was based on claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted that his claims had been false.
Powell falsely alleged that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. As a follow-up to the presentation, the U.S., UK, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but Canada, France, Germany, and Russia strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia; the aforementioned countries eventually withdrew their resolution.
Opposition to the invasion coalesced in the worldwide 15 February 2003 anti-war protest that attracted between six and ten million people in more than 800 cities, the largest such protest in human history.