Overthrow Series

 

Iraq [Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006]

 

Iraq-Iran War

 

In the 1980s, Iraq was engaged in a horrific eight-year was with Iran. Bitterly anti-American militants had recently seized power in Iran, and President Reagan was eager to ensure that they did not win this was. Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld, his special Middle East envoy, to meet Saddam and ask him what the United States could do to help his cause. Soon afterward, American intelligence agencies began sending Saddam reports about Iranian troop movements that allowed him to fend off what might have been abject defeat.

 

Over the next seven years, the United States sold Saddam $200 million worth of weaponry, as well as a fleet of helicopters. Washington also gave him $5 billion in agricultural credits and a $684 million loan to build an oil pipeline to Jordan, a project he awarded to the California based Bechtel Corporation.

 

Saddam Invades Kuwait

 

The Americans had not objected when Saddam attacked Iran nearly a decade before, and he wanted to be sure they would not object this time either. Glaspie told him what he wanted to hear. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” she told Saddam.

 

Eight days later, Saddam sent his army into Kuwait, easily subdued it, and announced that it had become Iraq’s nineteenth province. To his great surprise, President Bush reacted with outrage. Kuwait was a key supplier of oil to the United States, and Bush vowed that the Iraqi occupation would “not stand.” By invading Kuwait, evidently under the mistaken impression that the United States would approve, Saddam turned himself into a pariah in the eyes of Washington.

 

On January 16, 1991, the American-led coalition launched a bombing campaign against Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait. It followed with a land invasion, not only chasing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but pursuing it most of the way back to Baghdad. Some urged Bush to press on to the capital itself and depose Saddam, but he prudently declined.

 

Saddam Survives – U.S. Plots Unfinished Business

                                    

Saddam survived all these assaults. Some powerful Americans, especially several who had held important posts in past Republican administrations, found his resilience unbearable. They harbored a deep sense that Saddam had gotten the better of them, and developed a passionate determination to crush him.

 

When Bush’s son assumed the presidency at the beginning of 2001, several of these men found themselves back in power. Among them were Cheney, who had been the father’s secretary of defense and was the son’s vice president; Wolfowitz, who had been a senior defense department official under the father and became the department’s second-ranking figure in the son’s administration; and Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford’s defense secretary In the 1970s, took that post for a second time in 2001.

 

They returned to office determined to complete what they saw as unfinished business in Iraq. Beneath them lay an intense desire for vindication, for final victory over an adversary who had taunted the United States – and the Bush family – for more than a decade.

 

Drumbeat for War -- WMDs and Axis of Evil

 

The public drumbeat for war intensified steadily during 2002. On January 29, in his State of the Union address, President Bush named Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” that posed “a grave and growing danger” to the United States and the rest of the world. He called the Iraqi regime on of the most dangerous on earth, and asserted that it was developing, or actively seeking to develop, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

 

Most of Bush’s advisors, recognizing that he had made up his mind to dispose Saddam, embraced the idea and urged him on. CIA director George Tenet was among the most enthusiastic. His analyst had found clues suggesting that Saddam might be concealing forbidden weapons, but no hard proof.

 

“The worst thing that could happen,” Bush said, “would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world.” No one could disagree with that. For the world to stand idly by while a brutal dictator built weapons of mass destruction and passed them on to terrorists would be not just irresponsible but suicidal.

 

Bush decided it was time for Secretary of State Powell to address the Security Council, present the evidence against Saddam, and demand a resolution endorsing military action against him. In the autumn of 2002, the United States Senate and House of Representatives voted by large margins to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq if he deemed it necessary.

 

The United States had massed 130,000 solders in Kuwait and tens of thousands more nearby. Britain, the only other super power that supported Operation Iraqi Freedom, had 25,000 there, and there were small, symbolic contingents from Poland and Australia. At midday on March 19, the first American to advance teams crossed into Iraq.

 

Some of history’s greatest conquerors have paused near Baghdad before assaulting it. None ever assembled as overwhelming a force as the United States Army massed around the ancient city in the spring of 2004. Its commanders had a simple plan. They encircled Baghdad with tanks to prevent defenders from fleeing, and then sent troops in to capture palaces, military bases, and other keystones of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

 

Colonel David Perkins, the commander of a mechanized infantry brigade, smashed his way to the center of Baghdad in an audacious “Thunder Run,” using only his own men, a total of fewer than one thousand. They would take this city of five million, he promised, in a single day.

 

Mission Accomplished

 

Bush appeared on television to tell the world that the American-led invasion of Iraq had begun, twenty-four hours earlier than originally planned. He said bombs were falling on selected targets of military importance and that these strikes were “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”

 

Iraqi soldiers by the thousands ripped off their uniforms and melted into the countryside as American columns charged northward. The invading force faced no sustained resistance on the ground, no aerial bombardment, and no chemical or biological attacks.

 

On May 1, forty-three days after the war began, he stepped out of a fighter jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, anchored a few miles off the coast of California. Dressed in a pilot’s flight suit, he strode across the deck like a proud conqueror. Then, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers and sailors and airmen on board, he declared that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. Behind him hung a giant banner that summarized his speech in two words: “Mission Accomplished.”

 

In the most spectacular misjudgment of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bush and his aides convinced themselves that there would be no serious problems after the invasion. They dismissed those who warned otherwise as whining doubters.

 

Mission Not Accomplished

 

Trouble began just hours after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, as looters raged through Baghdad and criminals ran amok. Then, six weeks later, the Americans decreed the dissolution not simply of Saddam’s secret police and elite Republican Guard but of the entire Iraqi army.  That left more than 300,000 young men, all armed and trained in military tactics, without work and seething with anger against the occupier. Within a few months, enemies of the occupation built the most potent insurgent force the United States had faced since its misadventure in Vietnam.

 

The other shock that awaited Americans after they deposed Saddam was that he had, in fact, been telling the truth when he claimed not to have any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.

 

The war turned Iraq into a cauldron of violent anarchy and a magnet for fanatics from around the world. It set off a global wave of anti-American passion that had no precedent in history. Worst of all, it consumed enormous resources that might have been used in the war against Al Qaeda and other terror groups. The Iraq war allowed them to continue their worldwide jihad, launching deadly attacks in Indonesia, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere.

 

Military occupations are by their nature oppressive, and although the abusive tactics that American soldiers used in Iraq may have seemed defensible from the army’s perspective, they angered many Iraqis and countless others around the world. This anger rose to a fever pitch when graphic photographs emerged showing that American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, had treated prisoners in shocking ways.