Iraq War

• 1. Introduction

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  At 5:34 in the morning on the 20th of March 2003, Baghdad time, the United States began bombing Iraq. There was no declaration of war. Within weeks, a government that had ruled Iraq for decades was gone, its leader captured in a hole in the ground near his hometown. Within months, the country was burning.

  What followed was not the short, decisive conflict that many in the Bush administration had promised. It stretched across eight years of American combat operations, spawned a sectarian civil war, gave rise to a new extremist movement, and left an estimated 150,000 to over a million people dead. The primary justification for going to war, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, turned out to be false.

  How did the United States convince itself and its allies to launch one of the costliest conflicts of the modern era? What happened to Iraq after its government was toppled? And what does it mean that a 2016 British inquiry concluded the war was simply unnecessary? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Road to Invasion

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  Removing Saddam Hussein from power became official United States foreign policy in October 1998, when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act. The act allocated $97 million for Iraqi opposition groups and directed the government to support a transition to democracy in Iraq. This was years before September 11th.

  When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, his party's campaign platform called for the "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act as a "starting point" in a plan to "remove" Saddam. Plans for an invasion were being drafted in the first weeks of his administration. What the September 11 attacks provided was not the motive but the opening.

  On the day of the attacks themselves, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides for the "best info fast" and explicitly raised the question of whether to "hit Saddam Hussein at the same time. Not only Osama bin Laden." Bush ordered his counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to investigate possible Iraqi involvement in the attacks the very next day.

  By January 2002, Bush was calling Iraq a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his State of the Union address. The intelligence community, however, was telling him something different. A report from Major General Glen Shaffer, dated the 5th of September 2002, revealed that the Joint Chiefs' intelligence directorate estimated American knowledge of Iraq's weapons programs ranged from essentially zero to roughly 75 percent, and called their analysis of a possible nuclear program "based largely on analysis of imprecise intelligence."

  Despite this, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld expressed skepticism toward the CIA and preferred analysis supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that claimed Saddam was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Former President Bill Clinton warned publicly in October 2002 that pre-emptive military action, "however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future." Pope John Paul II told Bush privately: "Every violence, against one or a million, is a blasphemy addressed to the image and likeness of God." Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer confronted Rumsfeld at the Munich Security Conference in 2003 with the words: "Excuse me, I am not convinced!"

• 3. A War Built on False Claims

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  On the 5th of February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations Security Council to present evidence that Iraq was concealing unconventional weapons. Part of his case rested on testimony from an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany, codenamed "Curveball," whose real name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. He later admitted his claims had been fabricated. Both German and British intelligence had warned that this source was untrustworthy before Powell used him.

  UN inspectors working inside Iraq at the time were not finding what Powell described. By February 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency found no evidence or plausible indication of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. Hans Blix, the chairman of the UN weapons inspection commission, said in March 2003 that progress had been made in inspections and no evidence of weapons of mass destruction had been found.

  The post-invasion search confirmed it. The Iraq Survey Group's Duelfer Report, released in 2004, stated that Iraq did not have a viable weapons of mass destruction program. The 9/11 Commission concluded that same year there was no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated on the 16th of September 2004 that the invasion was not in conformity with the UN Charter and was, from his perspective, illegal.

  The 2016 Chilcot Report, a British government inquiry, went further, concluding the war was unnecessary because peaceful alternatives had not been fully explored. Tony Blair's support for the conflict contributed directly to his resignation in 2007. The consequences of the false justifications extended beyond politics: they gave the insurgency a moral argument it would exploit for years.

• 4. Toppling a Regime

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  The first CIA team entered Iraq not in March 2003 but on the 10th of July 2002, more than eight months before the official invasion. Teams from the CIA's Special Activities Division worked to persuade Iraqi military commanders to surrender without fighting and organized the Kurdish Peshmerga into a northern front.

  When the formal invasion came, it involved 248,000 US soldiers, 45,000 British soldiers, 2,000 Australians, and 194 Polish soldiers from the Special Forces unit GROM. Another 70,000 Iraqi Kurdish militia troops supported the operation. The US code-named it Operation Iraqi Freedom; the British called it Operation Telic; the Australians, Operation Falconer.

  Iraq's military had prepared for both conventional and irregular combat at once, yielding territory to armored columns while launching guerrilla attacks on supply lines. The US 3rd Infantry Division swept west through the desert and then north to Baghdad. The 1st Marine Division fought its way through Nasiriyah. On the 9th of April, Baghdad fell, ending what the source describes as Saddam's 24-year rule.

  The invasion phase formally concluded on the 15th of April when Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, fell to the Marines of Task Force Tripoli. By then an estimated 9,200 Iraqi combatants had been killed, along with roughly 3,750 civilians. Coalition losses stood at 139 US military personnel and 33 British. Saddam Hussein himself remained at large. He was captured on the 13th of December 2003 at a farm near Tikrit in an operation called Red Dawn, conducted by the US 4th Infantry Division. He was executed on the 30th of December 2006.

• 5. The Occupation's Unraveling

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  Ambassador Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq on the 12th of May 2003 and set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Green Zone. On his first day in the job, the 16th of May, he issued Order 1, which excluded members of the Baath Party from the new Iraqi government. The policy ultimately removed between 85,000 and 100,000 people from their positions, including 40,000 school teachers who had joined the party simply to remain employed. US Army General Ricardo Sanchez later called it a "catastrophic failure."

  A second order dissolved the Iraqi Army outright. Hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers who had been promised work helping to rebuild the country found themselves suddenly unemployed and armed. In the week before that order was issued, no coalition soldiers were killed by hostile action in Iraq. The week after, five were killed. Many former soldiers joined the insurgency.

  The Pentagon later acknowledged that 250,000 short tons of a total 650,000 short tons of ordnance were looted in the post-invasion chaos, providing a significant supply of ammunition for that insurgency. In the autumn of 2003, a surge in guerrilla attacks produced what military analysts called the "Ramadan Offensive." The UN headquarters in Baghdad was bombed; Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed. Three governorates, Baghdad, Al Anbar, and Saladin, which held 35 percent of Iraq's population, were responsible for 73 percent of US military deaths by December 2006.

  The looting extended to Iraq's cultural heritage as well. Large numbers of antiquities including the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet were stolen from the Iraq National Museum and from archaeological sites across the country. Many were smuggled through the United Arab Emirates and Israel into the United States. In the 2020s, around 17,000 artifacts were returned, though an Iraqi archaeology professor at the University of Baghdad called the repatriation only a partial success.

• 6. Sectarian War and the Surge

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  On the 22nd of February 2006, a bomb destroyed the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Although no one was killed in the blast itself, over 100 dead bodies with bullet holes were found the following day. The US military calculated that Baghdad's average homicide rate tripled from 11 to 33 deaths per day in the aftermath. The UN described conditions in Iraq that year as a "civil war-like situation."

  The power vacuum created by Saddam's removal, combined with the Coalition Provisional Authority's mismanagement, had fueled precisely the sectarian conflict that German Foreign Minister Fischer had predicted before the war began. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who took office in 2006, pursued policies that alienated the Sunni minority, deepening those tensions further.

  On the 10th of January 2007, Bush proposed sending an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq in a televised address. General David Petraeus, who took command of coalition forces on the 10th of February 2007, oversaw the "Surge" strategy that followed. By December 2008, the US Defense Department reported that overall violence had dropped 80 percent compared to before the surge. Iraqi civilian fatalities fell from roughly 3,500 in January 2007 to 490 in November 2008, according to the Brookings Institution.

  The deadliest single attack of the entire war occurred not in the height of the insurgency but on the 14th of August 2007, when coordinated suicide bombings killed nearly 800 civilians in the northern settlement of Kahtaniya. The victims were Yazidis, a non-Muslim ethnic minority. Investigative reporter Bob Woodward cited US government sources who said the surge itself was not the primary reason for the eventual drop in violence; newer covert techniques to find and kill insurgents played a larger role.

• 7. Withdrawal and Aftermath

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  The US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, approved by the Iraqi government on the 4th of December 2008, set firm deadlines: US combat forces would leave Iraqi cities by the 30th of June 2009, and all US forces would be completely out of Iraq by the 31st of December 2011. On the 1st of January 2009, the United States handed control of the Green Zone and Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace to the Iraqi government in a ceremony Prime Minister al-Maliki proposed declaring "Sovereignty Day."

  President Barack Obama announced the formal end of US combat operations on the 27th of February 2009, at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. The United Kingdom formally ended combat operations on the 30th of April 2009. Australia withdrew its combat forces on the 28th of July 2009. US forces withdrew from Baghdad on the 29th of June 2009.

  The war left behind a transformed geopolitical landscape. Al-Maliki's government, which held power until 2014, continued alienating Iraq's Sunni minority, helping to create the conditions in which the Islamic State would rise. In 2014, the United States was drawn back into Iraq at the head of a new coalition called Combined Joint Task Force - Operation Inherent Resolve, as what had begun as an insurgency evolved into the Islamic State's full-scale campaign of territorial conquest.

  The total death toll from the Iraq War has been estimated at between 150,000 and over a million people, with more than 100,000 of those civilians. Most deaths occurred not during the three-week invasion but during the years of insurgency and civil war that followed. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates predicted before the withdrawal was complete that he expected to see "perhaps several tens of thousands of American troops" remaining in Iraq even after 2011 as a residual force, a forecast that would prove accurate once the Islamic State forced a new American engagement.