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L15 Overview

Introduction

On March 20, 2003, a U.S.-led coalition of military forces invaded Iraq in what came to be known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. The rationale for the invasion actually dates back to the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when an even larger U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in response to that nation’s invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait. Kuwait was quickly liberated and coalition forces advanced into Iraq, but they stopped short of Baghdad and failed to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Subsequently, Hussein refused to cooperate with United Nations inspectors enforcing a post-war weapons ban, including a prohibition against Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. In response, the UN passed a series of resolutions demanding compliance, culminating in Resolution 1441, which offered Iraq one final opportunity to comply with UN orders to disarm. When Iraq again refused to cooperate, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to make a major speech condemning Iraq. Powell’s speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, stopped short of asking the UN to intervene militarily, but it established a strong rationale for military intervention and hinted that the United States would act alone if necessary.

On March 17, George W. Bush went on national television to warn that military action was imminent. In that speech, Bush recalled the more than 12 years of efforts to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and he labeled Hussein’s regime a threat because of its history of “reckless aggression” and its “deep hatred of America.”  “The danger is clear,” Bush declared, and he cited both congressional and UN resolutions that he claimed gave the United States the “sovereign authority” to take action. Then came the ultimatum: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.” According to Bush, the “security of the world” demanded “disarming Saddam Hussein now,” and if the UN lacked the resolve to take action, then the United States would act on its own. A little more than 48 hours later, the war began.

Operation Iraqi Freedom proved more difficult than anybody ever imagined. Saddam Hussein was toppled after only 21 days of fighting, and Bush famously declared “mission accomplished” in a speech onboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. But the occupation of Iraq dragged on for years, costing billions of dollars and thousands of American and British lives. For critics of the war, those costs were even harder to swallow because much of the original rationale for the war ultimately proved false. Hussein, it turned out, had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any proof that he had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. The whole episode seemed to confirm an old adage often attributed to progressive Republican U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California: “The first casualty of war is the truth.”

Objectives

By the end of the lesson, you should be able to do the following:

  • Discuss the causes of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their connections to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the War on Terror.
  • Summarize the three major indictments against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Colin Powell’s speech to the UN on February 5, 2003.
  • Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Powell’s February 5 speech to the UN.
  • Discuss how George W. Bush, in his March 17, 2003 speech on Iraq, made the case for a U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
  • Describe how, in the same address, Bush portrayed Saddam Hussein as an “enemy” and as a threat to the United States.

Lesson Readings

L15 Colin Powell at the United Nations

Colin Powell’s speech at the UN on February 5, 2003 undoubtedly will go down in history as one of the low points in Powell’s otherwise distinguished career. A decorated war hero who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War, Powell was perhaps the most credible military expert within the Bush administration—a moderate in an administration of military hard-liners. Known for carefully evaluating evidence and for preferring diplomacy over military action, Powell was no ideologue, no partisan hack “presenting the party line,” as David Zarefsky puts it in our critical essay for this lesson. To the contrary, Powell’s choice to speak at the UN was highly symbolic, highlighting the importance of the issue and calling to mind a famous speech delivered forty years earlier at the UN: U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s dramatic revelation that the Soviet Union had stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba

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Powell’s speech had some of the same sort of drama as Stevenson’s speech, as he divulged secret intelligence information and displayed photographic and even videotaped evidence. The difference was that Powell had no direct evidence proving the presence of weapons of mass destruction, like Stevenson’s photos of the Russian missile sites in Cuba. Much of Powell’s reasoning and evidence seemed to prove only that Iraq was not cooperating with the UN inspection teams, or that they had not given up their ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction. Powell also made arguments about the Iraqi dictator’s links to al-Qaeda and his human rights abuses, but as Zarefsky points out, the structure of the speech placed much more emphasis on weapons of mass destruction. According to Zarefsky, Powell’s reasoning, while at times resembling the logical fallacy argumentum ad ignorantium (argument based on the absence rather than the presence of evidence), did seem to establish “reasonable if not certain grounds for the coercive disarmament of Iraq.” The problem, however, was that much of Powell’s evidence later proved false. Indeed, Powell would later apologize for the speech, claiming that he had been misled and calling the speech a “blot” on his otherwise distinguished record of public service.

L15 Bush’s Ultimatum and the War in Iraq

Colin Powell asked nothing of the UN in his speech of February 5, 2003. He advocated no specific military action. He did not even ask for another UN resolution ordering Iraq to disarm. He did, however, make the case that Iraq posed “a threat to international peace and security,” and he made it clear that the United States was not willing to run the risk that he might use his weapons of mass destruction against the American people. That was “not an option, not in a post-September 11 world,” Powell declared.  And so when the UN failed to act decisively, George W. Bush stepped in to announce that the United States was taking matters into its own hands.

Bush’s speech of March 17, 2003 is yet another example of the rhetoric of war.

 

President Bush’s Address on Iraq

President Bush’s Address on IraqClick to view undefined

Print Summary for President Bush’s Address on Iraq

 

Like most war speeches, Bush’s speech depicted the United States as resorting to war as a last resort. He also painted a portrait of the “enemy” as diabolical and evil, reminding his listeners that the Iraqi regime already had used weapons of mass destruction against its neighbors and even its own people. Moreover, they bore a “deep hatred of America and our friends” and had “aided, trained, and harbored terrorists,” including operatives of al-Qaeda. Sounding another theme typical of the rhetoric of war, Bush insisted that the United States had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement, but the Iraqis had only used diplomacy as a “ploy” to “gain time and advantage.” Thus, America had no choice but to respond with force—with or without UN authorization. According to Bush, peaceful diplomacy would not work because “we are not dealing with peaceful men,” and the UN, while recognizing the severity of the threat, lacked the “resolve” to act. Thus, it was up to the United States. “The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now,” Bush concluded, and “America and our allies accept that responsibility.”

The invasion of Iraq began with an air strike on the presidential palace on May 19, followed the next day by a massive incursion of ground forces in southern Iraq. With air strikes disabling Iraqi command and control, the defensive forces put up little resistance, and the coalition troops advanced easily into the heart of Iraq. Hussein and other top Iraqi leaders went into hiding, and coalition forces rolled into Baghdad just three weeks into the invasion. After fierce fighting in and around Baghdad, the capitol city fell and the invasion was declared a success. Unfortunately, Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq only signaled the beginning of a long insurgency and civil war that kept U.S. combat troops in that country for another seven-and-a-half years.

L15 The Lessons of the War in Iraq

As of November 2010, the war in Iraq had cost the United States approximately $900 billion in taxpayer money, and it had left 4,457 American service personnel dead and another 32,102 wounded. Some 9,950 Iraqi police and soldiers also died in the war, along with more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Was it worth it? What do we have to show for that large investment in blood and treasure?

Supporters of the War in Iraq argue that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a major achievement, regardless of whether he ever had weapons of mass destruction or provided aid to terrorists. They argue that the Iraqi people are now better off both politically and economically, and they claim that America’s credibility in the world has been enhanced by our willingness to stay the course. New York Times columnist David Brooks, for example, has concluded that our effort at “nation building” in Iraq was a “success” and argues that the challenge now is to “safeguard an American accomplishment that has been too hard won.”

Critics of the war, on the other hand, argue that all that effort only made things worse, both for the Iraqis and for America’s War on Terror. The war has done little to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis, they argue, and it has only aided the terrorists in their efforts to recruit new followers. According to Matt Druss of the Center for American Progress, for example, the argument that we somehow deterred terrorist attacks on the United States by “taking the fight to the terrorists” was one of the “most dubious and, frankly, profane justifications” for the war because the occupation itself contributed to the “radicalization and mobilization” of many new terrorists.

Clearly, it will be some time—decades perhaps—before we can say with any certainty whether the War in Iraq established a stable democracy in Iraq or aided in the fight against terrorism. What we can say, however, is that more Americans than ever now think that the war was a mistake. In March of 2003, only 23% of Americans responding to a Gallup poll agreed that the U.S. had “made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.” By July 2010, that number had risen to 54%. Whatever the verdict of history, the War in Iraq—for the time being, at least—appears to have made the American people a bit more skeptical about the rhetoric of war.

 

 

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