How the Iraq war started

“Our mission is clear,” declared president George W. Bush following the ground invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction [WMDs], to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people”.

The Bush administration alleged a material breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which in late 2002 had given Iraq “a final opportunity” to disarm (an obligation imposed after its defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991).

The official case for war fell apart quickly: no significant WMDs were ever found, and by late 2003, Bush conceded there was no evidence linking Saddam to al-Qa’eda. That has led many to suggest a range of other motives, from spreading democracy to controlling the oil trade, to projecting US power.

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But the 9/11 attacks were the trigger: accounts suggest Bush made the decision early in 2002.

Did we go to war on a false prospectus?

No, in the sense that in 2003 US and British intelligence genuinely believed Iraq had WMD, as did France and Germany. (Saddam had destroyed his WMD in the 1990s, but was unwilling to reveal this; as the UN weapons inspector Hans Blix put it, he had kept the “beware of the dog” sign, though he’d got rid of the dog.)

But yes, in the sense that the intelligence was deeply flawed – in many cases second-or third-hand, or fabricated by regime opponents living in exile – and was presented without the necessary qualifications.

In September 2002, PM Tony Blair published a dossier that, he said, “established beyond doubt” that Iraq had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and could deploy them within 45 minutes. In 2016, the Iraq Inquiry chaired by John Chilcot found that Blair’s certainty on this point was not justified, and that British intelligence ought to have corrected him.

How was the decision to invade made?

A timetable was set early on: the US wanted to invade in spring 2003, before the summer heat. Everything else – intelligence, legal arguments, diplomacy – ultimately cleaved to that.

The “Downing Street Memo” of July 2002 quoted Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, just back from Washington, saying that war had become “inevitable”: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The Chilcot inquiry found the decision was made before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted; and Blair had decided to support war early on. “I will be with you, whatever,” he told Bush in July 2002.

Is this a case of 20/20 hindsight?

To an extent: few admit to backing the war today, although at the time 49 nations supported it, along with (according to YouGov) 54% of the UK public, and most of the British press. There were, though, plenty of dissenters.

More than 750,000 people joined the Stop the War rally in London on 15 February 2003. On 18 March 2003, 139 Labour MPs, along with every Liberal Democrat and a few rebel Tories, voted for an amendment that said that “the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established”. For the same reason, France and Germany opposed the invasion; the Arab League issued a statement warning that it would “open the gates of hell”.

Why did things go wrong?

The US did not have a clear postwar plan. A meticulously planned military operation – leading to total conquest by 1 May, incurring about 150 casualties – was followed by a totally incompetent occupation. Iraqi euphoria at Saddam’s removal gave way to looting (“Stuff happens,” said US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Freedom’s untidy.”).

UK postwar planning was also “wholly inadequate”, found Chilcot, who identified key failings, such as the policy of total “de‐Ba’athification” (the removal of all officials from Saddam’s ruling party) and the dissolution of Iraq’s security services.

“But the big mistake, the original sin,” says Prof Toby Dodge of the LSE, “was to invade a country you know nothing about with a bunch of exiles that had not been there for 20 years. It was destined for failure. Full stop.”

Why did Iraq descend into chaos?

The insurgency against US and coalition troops began in 2003, led by Ba’athists and Sunnis whose long ascendancy over Iraq’s Shia majority had been ended. It was galvanised by civilian deaths and reports of US abuses – notably the torture of suspects in Abu Ghraib prison, revealed in early 2004.

Simultaneously, Shia militia groups fought against both Sunnis and the occupation. In 2006, full-scale sectarian war erupted with the bombing of a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra by Sunni extremists. Brutal reprisals by Shia militants and “death squads” against Sunni civilians followed, feeding a cycle of violence.

The situation was stabilised in 2007 by the US troop “surge”, supported by Sunni moderates. But Iraq was plunged into civil war again by Islamic State, whose leaders met in a US prison camp, and which proclaimed a caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

What were the long-term results?

Iraq, today, is relatively calm and is a democracy of sorts; but the rule of law is weak, militias still play a big role, and it is one of the most corrupt states on Earth.

Against the limited gains must be set the carnage: casualties are hard to estimate, but Iraq Body Count recorded some 200,000 civilian deaths up to 2019. There were also 4,491 US and 179 UK military deaths.

Geopolitically, the war was a disaster: it poisoned America’s image in the Middle East, distracted it from the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, undermined the case for democracy, and strengthened Iran and its proxies. It also undermined one of the most basic elements of international law: that states should not invade other states. As Vladimir Putin’s apologists so often say: what about Iraq?