Iraq War Begins
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, with contingents from Australia and Poland and without a Security Council resolution authorising force. The stated case was that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting a nuclear programme, in breach of the obligations imposed after 1991. Colin Powell presented it to the Security Council in February 2003, and much of it rested on sources — a defector codenamed Curveball among them — that the agencies had been warned were unreliable. No such weapons were found. The Iraq Survey Group reported in 2004 that the programmes had been destroyed in the 1990s. Baghdad fell in three weeks and the regime with it. What followed was not planned for. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved the Iraqi army in May 2003, putting several hundred thousand armed men out of work, and excluded the top four ranks of the Ba'ath Party from public employment, which removed most of the people who ran the schools, hospitals and ministries. An insurgency began within months and became a sectarian civil war after the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in 2006, with Shia militias and Sunni groups killing on a scale that emptied mixed neighbourhoods. Around 4,500 American and 179 British personnel died. Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from roughly 200,000 documented civilians to several hundred thousand. The war strengthened Iran, produced the organisation that became Islamic State, and did lasting damage to Western claims about intervention. The Chilcot inquiry reported in 2016 that Britain had gone to war before peaceful options were exhausted and on flawed intelligence presented with unwarranted certainty. Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003 and hanged in 2006.
- Year: 2003 CE
- Category: Military
