2003 invasion of Iraq

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened with an airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad on the 20th of March 2003. It was the first stage of the Iraq War, and it lasted just over a month. A coalition led by the United States carried it out, with troops that were mainly American, British, Australian, and Polish. The leaders who launched it said Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. They also said its president, Saddam Hussein, had to go. Several long-standing American allies, including Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand, strongly opposed the invasion. This documentary asks how the case for war was built and who challenged it. It asks what secret preparations came before the first bombs. And it asks why the fighting moved so quickly across the country.

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• 2. Road to War

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  The Gulf War began in 1990 and ended in 1991 with a ceasefire between the United Nations coalition and Iraq. The United States and its allies then adopted a policy of containment toward Saddam Hussein. It combined economic sanctions from the UN Security Council, ongoing weapons inspections, and no-fly zones declared by the United States and the United Kingdom. The zones were meant to protect the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shias in the south from attack by their own government. Iraqi military helicopters and planes regularly contested them.

  Inspectors from the UN Special Commission, known as UNSCOM, had been charged with disarming Iraq after the war. Their investigations uncovered the details of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs. The biological program had started in the early 1980s, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. It had received help from American and European countries that were reportedly unaware of Iraq's intentions. UNSCOM concluded that the program had not continued after the war.

  In 1998, UN weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, and some of them had been accused of spying for the United States. Months later came the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change official American foreign policy. It provided $97 million for Iraqi "democratic opposition organizations". That goal sat awkwardly beside UN Security Council Resolution 687, which focused on weapons programs and never mentioned regime change. One month after the act, the United States and United Kingdom bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox. Their stated reason was to hamper Iraq's ability to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. American intelligence personnel also hoped the bombing would weaken Saddam's grip on power.

  George W. Bush's inauguration in January 2001 brought a harder line. The Republican Party's 2000 campaign platform had called for the United States to "remove" Saddam. After leaving the administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said an attack on Iraq had been planned since the inauguration. He added that the very first National Security Council meeting had discussed an invasion. O'Neill later backtracked, saying those talks continued a policy begun under the Clinton administration. Even so, little formal movement toward invasion occurred until the attacks of the 11th of September.

  On the morning of the 11th of September 2001, al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, hijacked commercial airliners in four coordinated attacks on the United States. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Messages intercepted by the National Security Agency during the attacks pointed to al-Qaeda. Yet by mid-afternoon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Pentagon to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. According to aides near him, Rumsfeld wrote: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only UBL Usama bin Laden". The 9/11 Commission Report says he was weighing either man, or perhaps someone else, as the culprit.

  On the 12th of September, Bush ordered counter-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to investigate any Iraqi involvement. Clarke's office issued a memo on the 18th of September. It noted wide ideological gaps between Iraq and al-Qaeda and only weak anecdotal evidence linking them. A briefing to Bush on the 21st of September found "scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with al-Qaeda." It wrote off the few known contacts as attempts to monitor the group rather than work with it.

  Vice president Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld were skeptical of the CIA. They pointed out that the agency had failed to predict the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. They preferred outside analysis, including material from the Iraqi National Congress and unvetted pieces of intelligence. That material alleged a secret relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda dating from 1992, run through the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

  On the 20th of September 2001, Bush told a joint session of Congress about a new "war on terror". The announcement came with a doctrine of "pre-emptive" military action, later called the Bush Doctrine. On the 21st of November, Bush told Rumsfeld to conduct a confidential review of OPLAN 1003, the war plan for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld went over it with General Tommy Franks of U.S. Central Command on the 27th of November. A record of that meeting includes the question "How start?" beside a list of possible justifications for war. Some advisers wanted an immediate invasion, while others wanted an international coalition and UN authorization. Bush chose to seek UN authorization while keeping the option of invading without it.

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• 3. The Case at the UN

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  White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained the timing of the campaign in a single remark: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." So the administration waited until September 2002. On the 12th of September, Bush made his case to the UN General Assembly. That same day, Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress there was "no question" that Saddam was working on weapons of mass destruction. The United Kingdom agreed with the American approach. France and Germany criticized the plans and argued for more diplomacy and inspections.

  After considerable debate, the Security Council adopted a compromise, Resolution 1441. It restored weapons inspections, gave Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations", and promised "serious consequences" for non-compliance. France and Russia made clear that they did not read those consequences as permitting force to overthrow the government. The American ambassador, John Negroponte, and the British ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, both publicly agreed that the text held no "automaticity" or "hidden triggers". Saddam accepted the resolution on the 13th of November, and inspectors returned under Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  By February 2003, the IAEA had "found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq". It concluded that items such as aluminum tubes, which might have served in enrichment centrifuges, were meant for other uses. UNMOVIC did not find evidence that weapons programs had continued or resumed. It did supervise the destruction of a few empty chemical rocket warheads and 50 liters of mustard gas that Iraq had declared and UNSCOM had sealed in 1998. It also oversaw the destruction of about 50 Al-Samoud missiles, which Iraq said stayed within a 150 km range limit but which had flown up to 183 km in tests. Shortly before the invasion, UNMOVIC said that verifying Iraqi compliance would take "months".

  On the 5th of February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the Security Council. His presentation included a computer-generated image of a "mobile biological weapons laboratory". That claim rested on an Iraqi emigrant in Germany named Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", who later admitted his claims were false. Powell also alleged ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which was false. He later admitted that his presentation contained inaccuracies, some of them "deliberately misleading", because the sourcing was wrong.

  The aluminum tubes told a similar story. The administration said in September 2002 that Iraq's attempts to buy thousands of them pointed to a secret uranium enrichment program. A 2002 report from the Institute for Science and International Security found it highly unlikely that the tubes could be used that way. Then, on the 7th of March 2003, the United States gave the IAEA documents suggesting that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger. The IAEA dismissed them as forgeries, and outside experts agreed.

  A third claim concerned drones. In October 2002, about 75 senators were told in closed session that Iraq could deliver biological and chemical weapons using unmanned aircraft launched from ships off the East Coast. In reality, Iraq had no offensive drone fleet. It had fewer than a handful of outdated Czech training drones, and the U.S. Air Force denied outright that it had any offensive capability. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the invasion, despite inspections lasting more than 18 months. Powell had predicted as much on the 24th of February 2001, when he said in Cairo that Saddam had "not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

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• 4. Shifting Justifications

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  General Tommy Franks listed eight objectives for the invasion. They included deposing Saddam's government, eliminating Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and driving terrorists out of the country. They also included ending sanctions, delivering humanitarian support, and securing oil fields "which belong to the Iraqi people". The final goal was to help Iraqis create conditions for a transition to representative self-government.

  Public statements put the emphasis in different places at different times. In October 2002, Bush said: "The stated policy of the United States is regime change." He added that if Saddam met all the UN conditions, that in itself would signal the regime had changed. British prime minister Tony Blair insisted on a narrower aim. In November 2002 he said of the UN challenge to Iraq: "it is disarmament, not regime change." On the 31st of January 2003, Bush repeated that the single trigger was a failure to disarm: "if he does not disarm, for the sake of peace, we, along with others, will go disarm Saddam Hussein." As late as the 25th of February, that was still the official line.

  The administration also pointed to terrorism. It never explicitly tied Iraq to the 11th of September, but it repeatedly hinted at a connection. In late 2001, Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that attack mastermind Mohamed Atta had met a senior Iraqi intelligence official. Later he called Iraq the "geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Polls show the effect. A New York Times and CBS poll found that 45% of Americans believed Saddam was "personally involved" in the attacks. A Knight Ridder poll in January 2003 found that 44% believed most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Soon after the attacks, only 3% had mentioned Iraq or Saddam at all.

  According to the BBC, a later poll suggested that 70% of Americans believed Saddam was personally involved. Steven Kull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes said in March 2003 that the administration had succeeded in creating a sense of some connection. In September 2003, Cheney stunned analysts by failing to dismiss the discredited claim. In 2004, presidential candidate John Kerry accused him of continuing "to intentionally mislead the American public". Intelligence officials have since largely discredited claims of operational links, and Powell himself later admitted he had no proof of any.

  As the evidence for weapons and terrorist ties weakened, some supporters leaned on a third argument, the Iraqi government's treatment of its own people. Human Rights Watch disagreed that this had ever been central. It argued that military intervention was not justified on humanitarian grounds, because "the killing in Iraq at the time was not of the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention."

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• 5. Protest and Back Channels

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  On the 15th of February 2003, between six and ten million people protested in more than 800 cities, the largest such protest in human history. In Rome alone, a rally of three million became the largest anti-war rally ever held. Americans polled in January 2003 had favored further diplomacy over invasion. By February, though, 64% supported taking military action to remove Saddam. The government had mounted an elaborate public relations campaign, and 85% of Americans said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

  At the UN, the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing force. Canada, France, Germany, and Russia strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote and a likely veto from France and Russia, the sponsors withdrew the resolution. On the 16th of March, Bush met Blair, Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, and Portuguese prime minister José Manuel Durão Barroso in the Azores. The summit remained a sensitive point for Aznar. In 2004, Madrid suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing. It was motivated by Spain's decision to join the war, and some Spaniards blamed the prime minister.

  On the 17th of March, Bush gave Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay, 48 hours to leave Iraq. The next day, the British House of Commons approved the government's motion for war by 412 votes to 149. The rebellion among government MPs was the largest since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Three ministers resigned in protest: John Denham, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the Leader of the House of Commons, Robin Cook. Cook told the House: "What has come to trouble me is the suspicion that if the 'hanging chads' of Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq."

  Meanwhile, Iraq was reportedly trying to talk its way out of war. In December 2002, a representative of Iraqi General Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti contacted former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro. The message was that Saddam knew of a campaign to link him to the 11th of September and prove he had weapons. Cannistraro said he reported this to senior State Department levels and was told to stand aside. He believed such offers were killed because they let Saddam stay in power. Iraq also sought contact through Egyptian, Syrian, French, German, and Russian channels.

  The most detailed account involves Imad Hage, a Lebanese-American in Beirut who had been recruited by the Defense Department. In January 2003, he met Iraqi intelligence official Hassan al-Obeidi. Al-Obeidi said Baghdad had no weapons and offered to let 2000 FBI agents confirm it. Later that month, Hage met General Habbush and Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in Baghdad. By Hage's account, they offered priority for American firms in oil and mining rights and UN-supervised elections. They also offered up to 5,000 inspectors, and the handover of al-Qaeda agent Abdul Rahman Yasin, held in Iraqi custody since 1994. The Pentagon denies that Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld knew of the plan.

  On the 7th of March, Richard Perle of the Defense Policy Board met Hage in Knightsbridge. A few days later, he told Hage that Washington would not let him meet Habbush. Perle later recalled the message to The Times as: "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad."

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• 6. Questions of Legality

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  In 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal under international law, as a breach of the UN Charter. He was not alone. The United States and United Kingdom argued that the Security Council had implicitly authorized force. The International Commission of Jurists, a group of 31 leading Canadian law professors, and the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy rejected that reasoning. On the 20th of November 2003, The Guardian alleged that Richard Perle had conceded the invasion was illegal but still justified.

  The American case rested partly on Resolution 678 of 1990. It authorized states working with Kuwait to use "all necessary means" to end Iraq's occupation and to restore international peace and security in the area. The resolution had never been rescinded. U.S. officials argued that by failing to disarm, Iraq violated Resolutions 660 and 678, so force could compel compliance. Critics answered that the right to decide how to enforce Security Council resolutions belongs to the Council alone. They said the invasion therefore broke Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. An independent commission created in the Netherlands examined Resolution 1441. It concluded that the text "cannot reasonably be interpreted as authorising individual member states to use military force to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's resolutions." The Dutch commission found the invasion violated international law. During the Commons debate in London, members were told that the Attorney General had advised the war was legal under earlier resolutions.

  American domestic law was a separate matter. In October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. In the Senate, 98% of Republicans voted in favor, along with 58% of Democrats. In the House, the figures were 97% and 39%. The resolution allowed Bush to use the armed forces "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to defend national security against the threat posed by Iraq.

  In 2006, the International Criminal Court's lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, reported receiving 240 separate communications about the war's legality. Many concerned British participation. He replied that he could consider only conduct during the war. No provision yet defined the crime of aggression or set the conditions for the court to act on it. In 2007, Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced House Resolution 333, with three articles of impeachment against Cheney. They charged him with manipulating evidence about Iraqi weapons, deceiving the public about links to al-Qaeda, and threatening aggression against Iran.

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• 7. The Hidden War

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  Paramilitary teams from the CIA's Special Activities Division and from the British intelligence service MI6 entered Iraq in July 2002. That was months before the invasion. Once on the ground, they prepared for the arrival of American and British forces. The CIA teams joined with Army Special Forces to organize the Kurdish Peshmerga. Together they defeated Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamist group allied with al-Qaeda, in the northeast corner of Iraq. The group had 600 to 800 fighters and was led by the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who later became an important insurgent leader. Its defeat came in late March during Operation Viking Hammer. The joint teams also captured a chemical weapons facility at Sargat, the only facility of its type found in the war.

  The CIA teams also carried out risky reconnaissance behind Iraqi lines to identify senior leaders. Those missions led to initial strikes on Saddam and his key generals. The strikes did not kill Saddam, but they effectively ended Iraq's ability to command its forces. Other strikes on generals succeeded, and CIA officers persuaded some Iraqi army officers to surrender their units or stay out of the fight. Four of the officers were awarded the Intelligence Star.

  MI6 ran Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories about Iraqi weapons in the media and build support for the invasion. It also bribed many of Saddam's closest allies for information. According to Tommy Franks, an American officer undercover as a diplomat, code-named "April Fool", was approached by an Iraqi intelligence agent. He sold the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plans prepared by Franks' team. The deception drew major Iraqi forces to the north and west, in anticipation of attacks through Turkey or Jordan that never came. That weakened defenses in the southeast, where the real attacks arrived from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf.

  Turkey, a NATO member, refused to let its territory be used. As a result, the CIA and Special Forces teams and the Peshmerga formed the entire northern force against the Iraqi government. Their presence kept the Iraqi army's 5th Corps tied down against the Kurds instead of moving south to meet the coalition.

  The air war had begun long before March 2003. In mid-2002, American aircraft in the no-fly zones began choosing targets more carefully in southern Iraq to disrupt command structures, under a plan known as Operation Southern Focus. British bomb tonnage rose from nothing in March 2002 to a pre-war peak of 54.6 tons in September. On the 5th of September, more than 100 aircraft struck an air defense site in western Iraq. The New Statesman wrote that the target was far from any area needing patrol and was hit to let special forces from Jordan enter unseen. Franks later admitted the bombing was meant to "degrade" Iraqi air defenses. Then-defense secretary Geoff Hoon said such "spikes of activity" were designed to "put pressure on the Iraqi regime". The Times reported they aimed to provoke Saddam into giving the allies an excuse for war. Leaked British Foreign Office legal advice found such provocations illegal.

  A leaked memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair on the 31st of January 2003 describes another idea. Bush allegedly said the United States was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft over Iraq, painted in UN colors. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

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• 8. Three Weeks to Baghdad

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  General David Petraeus recalled that the prevailing wisdom before the invasion was that it would be "a long, hard fight to Baghdad". His 101st Airborne Division began its preparation with a seminar on urban combat, because taking the city was viewed as the decisive event. That is not how it happened.

  On the night of the 17th of March, British SAS squadrons crossed from Jordan to attack a suspected chemical munitions site at a water-treatment plant in al-Qa'im. Their approach was compromised, a firefight followed, and one vehicle was abandoned and destroyed. An air strike finally silenced the opposition. In the early morning of the 19th of March, two F-117 stealth fighters dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on Dora Farms, in southern Baghdad. Nearly 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles followed. U.S. forces had acted on reports that Saddam was visiting his sons there. He was not present, and Baghdad hospitals reported one civilian killed and fourteen injured.

  At 21:00 that evening, helicopters of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment hit Iraqi observation posts along the southern and western borders. Within seven hours, more than 70 sites were destroyed, which left Iraq without early warning. Many observers had expected a long aerial bombing before any ground action, as in the Gulf War. Instead, American planners wanted simultaneous air and ground assaults to incapacitate Iraqi forces fast. The campaign, known as shock and awe, would bypass Iraqi units and cities wherever possible. Planners assumed that removing the leadership would collapse the military and win much of the population over to the invaders.

  The Iraqis adapted quickly. On the 22nd of March, Sergeant First Class Anthony Broadhead was in a tank heading for a bridge in Samawah. He waved at a group of Iraqis, who answered by attacking the American tanks with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. These paramilitary fighters were well armed but indistinguishable from civilians. They became a major challenge for U.S. forces throughout the Iraq War.

  The coalition itself was thinner than its label suggested. Of 49 countries on the original "coalition of the willing" list, only six besides the United States sent troops to the invasion force. About 200,194 troops were sent to Kuwait: 148,000 American, 50,000 British, 2,000 Australian, and 194 Polish special forces. They were supported by Peshmerga fighters estimated at upwards of 70,000. Turkey's refusal meant that only several thousand paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped into the north on the 26th of March, near Kirkuk. The original plan had called for the 15,000-strong 4th Infantry Division. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated Iraq's armed forces at 389,000, the Republican Guard at 80,000, and the Fedayeen Saddam at 44,000.

  Oil was a priority. Before the invasion, Iraqi forces had mined some 400 oil wells around Basra and the Al-Faw peninsula. Coalition troops launched an air and amphibious assault on Al-Faw in the closing hours of the 19th of March, supported by Royal Navy, Polish Navy, and Royal Australian Navy warships. Only 44 wells were destroyed and set ablaze, and they were quickly capped. That avoided the ecological damage and lost capacity that followed the Gulf War. At the port of Umm Qasr, coalition forces met heavy resistance. Fourteen coalition troops and 30 to 40 Iraqi troops were killed, and 450 Iraqis were taken prisoner.

  On the 23rd of March, a convoy from the 3rd Infantry Division took a wrong turn into Nasiriyah and was ambushed. Eleven American soldiers died, and seven were captured, including Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson. Lori Piestewa, from Tuba City, Arizona, and a member of the Hopi Tribe, died of wounds shortly after capture. She is believed to have been the first Native American woman killed in combat in a foreign war. Marines fought through the city for its bridges, and 18 died at the Saddam Canal. Six more were killed when an American A-10 accidentally attacked their amphibious vehicle. By the 28th of March, a severe sandstorm had halted the 3rd Infantry Division between Najaf and Karbala, and helicopter reinforcements were blocked for three days.

  At Najaf, American Apache helicopters first came under heavy fire and one was shot down. They attacked again successfully on the 26th of March. On the 29th, the 101st Airborne attacked near the Imam Ali Mosque and captured the airfield, but a suicide bomber killed four Americans. On the 1st of April, the 70th Armored Regiment drove an armored thrust through the city center called a "Thunder Run".

  The weapons used left long shadows. According to American data given to the Dutch Ministry of Defence, more than 300,000 depleted uranium rounds were fired, many near populated areas including Samawah, Nasiriyah, and Basra. Coalition forces also used 13,000 cluster munitions containing two million submunitions. Unexploded ordnance from the invasion and earlier wars still threatened civilians as of 2022.

  The end came fast. The coalition captured Baghdad on the 9th of April 2003-22 days after the invasion began, following the six-day Battle of Baghdad. Kirkuk fell on the 10th of April and Tikrit on the 15th. Saddam and the Iraqi leadership went into hiding. On the 1st of May, Bush declared the "end of major combat operations", which began the occupation phase and a fight against the Iraqi insurgency. U.S. forces captured Saddam on the 13th of December 2003.

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