1991-99
The First Gulf War, sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of neighbouring Kuwait, came to an end in February 1991 with a cease-fire negotiated between the UN Coalition and Iraq. Although militarily defeated, Saddam held on to power. The U.S. and its allies tried to keep him in check with no-fly zones and economic sanctions. It was revealed that a biological weapons program in Iraq had begun in the early 1980s with supplies from the US, Britain and European nations. He used Vx chemicals against Iran in a war which claimed up to two million lives, dropped sarin gas on the Kurds in the north of his country, and massacred Shias in the south to suppress rebels encouraged by the US, which then abandoned them to their fate. Saddam’s regime brought about the deaths of at least 250,000 Iraqis, according to reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
However, a post-Gulf War investigation concluded that there was no evidence the chemical weapons programme had continued. In October 1998, removing the Hussein regime became official US foreign policy. The Iraq Liberation Act followed Saddam’s expulsion of UN weapons inspectors and provided $97 million for Iraqi “democratic opposition organizations” to “establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq”. That legislation contrasted with a UN Security Council resolution which focused on weapons programmes and made no mention of regime change. The U.S. and UK launched a bombardment campaign of Iraq – Operation Desert Fox – ostensibly to hamper Iraq’s ability to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but US intelligence personnel also hoped it would help weaken Saddam’s grip on power.
2000
With the election of George W Bush, the US took a more aggressive policy toward Iraq, allegedly because he regarded Saddam “unfinished business” from his father’s presidency. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said that an attack on Iraq had been planned since Bush’s inauguration, and that Bush’s first US National Security Council meeting involved discussion of an invasion.
2001
Within hours of the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed National Security Agency (NSA) intercept data that pointed to al-Qaeda and ordered the military to prepare plans for attacking Iraq. Rumsfeld asked for: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only Osama bin Laden.” It was well known that there was no connection between Saddam and bin Laden’s organisation.
General Wesley Clark, the former Supreme NATO Allied Commander and Joint Chiefs of Staff Director of Strategy and Policy, later described his conversation with a military officer in the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 regarding a plan to attack seven Middle Eastern countries in five years: “As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”
Bush addressed Congress and announced his new “War on Terror” with a doctrine of “pre-emptive” military action. Some Bush advisers favoured an immediate invasion of Iraq, while others advocated building an international coalition and obtaining UN authorization. Bush eventually decided to seek that, while still reserving the option of invading without it.
2002
Blair’s stance on Iraq “tightened” after a private meeting with Bush in 2002, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, then the UK’s ambassador to the US. The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said the invasion was of “questionable legitimacy” as it was not backed by the majority of UN members or possibly even the British public. The US “assumed” the UK would contribute troops to the invasion even if there was no UN backing.
However, 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 formally made his case to the international community for an invasion of Iraq in his address to the UN Security Council. Britain and other key US allies agreed, while France and Germany were critical, arguing instead for continued diplomacy and weapons inspections. The Security Council adopted a compromise resolution which authorized the resumption of weapons inspections and promised “serious consequences” for non-compliance. Saddam accepted the resolution and inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of Hans Blix.
In October former President Bill Clinton warned about possible dangers of pre-emptive military action against Iraq. He told the Labour Party conference in Blackpool: “As a pre-emptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future… I don’t care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.” Hillary Clinton, while serving as senator, voted for military action, though she now says it was a mistake. The majority of Democrats in Congress voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Senator Jim Webb wrote shortly before the vote: “Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade.”
No 10 media supremo Alastair Campbell was heavily involved in the release of a “dodgy dossier” arguing that Saddam could unleash WMD within 45 minutes. Subsequent investigation revealed that it had been altered, on Campbell’s orders, to be consistent with a speech given by Bush and statements by other US officials. Campbell sent a memo to John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, in which he ordered that the British dossier be “one that complements rather than conflicts with” US claims. He later said: “Come on, you don’t seriously think we won’t find anything?”
Including the 45-minute claim was “asking for trouble”, Tony Blair’s former security co-ordinator Sir David Omand said. He described it as a “bit of local colour” which was used because there was little other detail that the intelligence services were happy to be included in the dossier. Air Marshall Sir Brian Burridge, who led UK ground forces in Iraq, said he was told by a top US commander 10 months before that it was a “matter of when not if” it went into Iraq.
2003
In February UN inspectors reported “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq”. The report concluded that certain items which could have been used in nuclear enrichment centrifuges, such as aluminum tubes, were in fact intended for other uses. It “did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction” or significant quantities of proscribed items.
Faced with polls suggesting most citizens favoured diplomacy over war, the US government engaged in an elaborate PR campaign. In the State of the Union address, President Bush said: “We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs.” Secretary of State Colin Powell showed the UN Security Council a computer generated image of a “mobile biological weapons laboratory”. It was based on claims by an Iraqi dissident living in Germany who later admitted that his claims had been false. Powell also presented evidence alleging Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda.
Blair embarked on a whirlwind tour of over a dozen countries to help build a coalition behind Bush. At the same time, however, he may have persuaded Bush to hold back from over-hasty action before a coalition was in place.
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy said: “The administration has succeeded in creating a sense that there is some connection [between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein]”. A poll showed that 45% of Americans believed Saddam was “personally involved” in 9/11 The Christian Science Monitor said: “Sources knowledgeable about US intelligence say there is no evidence that Hussein played a role in the 11 September attacks, nor that he has been or is currently aiding Al Qaeda … (but) the White House appears to be encouraging this false impression, as it seeks to maintain American support for a possible war against Iraq and demonstrate seriousness of purpose to Hussein’s regime.”
The US, Britain, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but NATO members like Canada, France, and Germany, together with Russia, strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia, the pro-war resolution was withdrawn. Opposition to the proposed invasion led to a worldwide February 15 protest which saw a million on British streets and up to nine million more in other countries, the largest such protest in human history according to the Guinness Book of Records. Such protests were ignored.
The following month the US, Britain, Poland, Australia, Spain, Denmark, and Italy began preparing for the invasion. Bush demanded that Saddam and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, surrender and leave Iraq, giving them a 48-hour deadline. Bombing of Iraq began the day before the deadline expired. It had no explicit UN authorisation.
The legality of the invasion of Iraq has been challenged ever since. Blair and others argued that the invasion was fully legal because authorisation was implied by the UN Security Council. Richard Perle, a senior member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, conceded that the invasion was illegal but still justified. International legal experts disagreed, arguing that the UN had not authorised regime change.
Tony Blair’s attitude had been summed up the previous September when he said: “Regime change in Iraq would be a wonderful thing. That is not the purpose of our action; our purpose is to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction…” Later he said: “So far as our objective, it is disarmament, not régime change – that is our objective. Now I happen to believe the regime of Saddam is a very brutal and repressive regime, I think it does enormous damage to the Iraqi people … so I have got no doubt Saddam is very bad for Iraq, but on the other hand I have got no doubt either that the purpose of our challenge from the United Nations is disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change.”
That position certainly changed during meeting between Bush and Blair on 31 January 2003 in the White House. A secret memo purportedly showed that the Bush administration had already decided on the invasion of Iraq at that point. Bush was allegedly floating the idea of painting a U2 spyplane in UN colours and letting it fly low over Iraq to provoke Iraqi forces into shooting it down, thereby providing a pretext for the invasion. Bush and Blair made a secret deal to carry out the invasion regardless of whether WMD were discovered by UN weapons inspectors, in direct contradiction to statements Blair made to the Commons afterwards that the Iraqi regime would be given a final chance to disarm. In the memo, Bush is paraphrased as saying, “The start date for the military campaign was now pencilled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin.” Bush said to Blair that he “thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups” in Iraq after the war.
The US Army’s top general, Eric Shinseki, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it would take “”everal hundred thousand soldiers” to secure Iraq. Rumsfield responded that a post-war troop commitment would be less than the number of troops required to win the war, and that “the idea that it would take several hundred thousand US forces is far from the mark.”
In the Commons a government motion in favour of going to war was approved 412 to 149. The number of government MPs who rebelled was the greatest since the repeal of the Corn Laws. Three government ministers resigned in protest at the war – John Dennham, Lord Hunt and Commons Leader Robin Cook. In a passionate speech, the latter said: “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.” He added: “In principle I believe it is wrong to embark on military action without broad international support. In practice I believe it is against Britain’s interests to create a precedent for unilateral military action.” During the debate, it was stated that the Attorney General had advised that the war was legal under previous UN Resolutions. But senior government legal advisor Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned, stating her legal opinion that an invasion would be illegal.
According to US General Tommy Franks, the objectives of the invasion were, “First, end the regime of Saddam Hussein. Second, to identify, isolate and eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Third, to search for, to capture and to drive out terrorists from that country. Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to terrorist networks. Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction. Sixth, to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian support to the displaced and to many needy Iraqi citizens. Seventh, to secure Iraq’s oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people. And last, to help the Iraqi people create conditions for a transition to a representative self-government.”
The invasion of Iraq lasted from 20 March to 1 May 2003 and saw 21 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops deposed Saddam’s regime. The dictator promised the “mother of all battles” but fled into hiding. The invasion consisted primarily of a conventionally fought war which included the capture of the Iraqi capital Over 160,000 troops were sent by the Coalition into Iraq, during the initial invasion phase; about 130,000 were sent from the US alone, with about 28,000 British soldiers, Australia (2,000), and Poland (194). Thirty-six other countries were involved in its aftermath.
Over 4,800 coalition military personnel died, 179 of them British, while tens of thousands of Saddam’s troops perished. Estimates on the number of casualties during the invasion in Iraq vary widely, and those of civilian casualties are more even morevariable. According to the organisation Iraq Body Count (IBC), approximately 7,500 civilians were killed during the invasion phase.
2004 ON
With Lancet study by public health experts estimated that 100,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths from all causes had occurred since the invasion began. IBC figures, to December 2010, place the number of civilians killed at 99,151–108,234. The IBC was also given access to the Wikileaks disclosures of the Iraq War logs and estimated that the total number of Iraqi deaths since the invasion at over 150,000, about 80% of them civilian.
Saddam was captured and hanged on TV. The lack of a coherent post-war exit strategy led to anarchy, insurgency and institutionalised corruption. Many believe it helped give birth to so-called Islamic State.
Opponents of military intervention in Iraq have attacked the decision to invade Iraq along a number of lines, including the evidence used to justify the war, arguing for continued diplomacy, challenging the war’s legality, suggesting that the US had other more pressing security priorities, and predicting that the war would destabilize the Middle East region. Most have been proved true. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in September 2004, “From our point of view and from the Charter point of view [the war] was illegal.”
Some critics within the US military community argued pointedly against the conflation of Iraq and the war on terror, and criticized Bush for losing focus on the more important objective of fighting al-Qaeda. Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon’s former top operations officer, wrote in 2006: “I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—al-Qaeda.” They further argued that containment would have been an effective strategy for the Hussein government, and that the top US priorities in the Middle East should be encouraging a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, working for the moderation of Iran, and solidifying gains made in Afghanistan and Central Asia.
In October 2015, Blair apologized for his ‘mistakes’ over Iraq War and admitted there were ‘elements of truth’ to the view that the invasion helped promote the rise of IS.
And this month, ahead of the July 6 publication of the long-delayed Chilcot inquiry, shadow city minister Richard Burgon, an ally of Jeremy Corbyn, said that Blair should be put on trial for the Iraq War if the Inquiry concludes the invasion was illegal. Burgon also hit back at Blair after the former attacked Corbyn for deciding to “do nothing” to protect innocent Syrians from President Assad’s barrel bombs. “The sad truth is both through the disastrous immoral war in Iraq and though his chasing of money all around the globe since he retired as prime minister, he has lost the trust and respect of lots of British people,” Burgon said.
However, sources close to Chilcot said that Blair will not be investigated for breaking any laws despite claims the intervention was illegal. The sources said that the report would “not seek to determine the guilt of innocence of anybody on trial.” It will not make “any judgements on the legality or anything like that, that is not the purpose [of the report].”It will instead focus on the decision making behind the conflict and whether any lessons can be learned. If that is proved correct, it will lead to more allegations of whitewash, conspiracy and cover-up.