The Iraq War
Another important shift in American society that followed 9/11 was increased US interventionism in the Muslim world. For instance, when it was revealed that Taliban-run Afghanistan was giving refuge to Osama Bin Laden (the terrorist who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks), Bush sent troops to the country on October 7, 2001. Although Bush insisted on maintaining a US presence in Afghanistan even after Bin Laden fled the targetted nation amidst the Battle of Tora Bora, the War in Afghanistan was originated through understandable principles and goals. 2,997 Americans were just brutally murdered by Bin Laden's goons in the largest ambush on US soil since Pearl Harbor, which took place in 1941 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was still president. The depraved killer responsible for this was gifted refuge in Afghanistan, making a war in that country justified, at least initially. The Iraq War, however, was far harder to defend.
To truly understand why the Iraq War, you actually need to go back to when Saddam Hussein became the leader of Iraq in a coup he conducted on July 16, 1979. Immediately, Saddam established himself as a brutal dictator concerned not with Iraq's social, geopolitical, and economic well-being, but rather on the retention of his own authority. For instance, on July 22, 1979, he met with the legislature and read out a list of people supposedly conspiring against his regime. The group ended up consisting of half the legislature. All the indicted legislators were then arrested the remaining half were given guns, with which they had to murder the accused. For this reason, it is of no surprise for us to learn that when Saddam discovered many of his critics were imams and Muslim scholars, he instantly secularized the Iraqi government. Iran had recently undergone the opposite transition: While Iraq transformed from a theocracy to a secular state, Iran transformed from a secular state to a theocratic dictatorship. As a result, a paranoid Saddam began fearing an Iranian attack.
What's more, Saddam knew most Iraqis were Sunni Muslims, while most Iranians were Shia Muslims. Back in 1975, Iranian and Iraqi officials got together to sign the Algiers Agreement, in which Iran agreed to cease backing a rebellion of Kurds (an ethnic minority unfairly persecuted in Iraq) in exchange for control over some of the waterways on the Iran-Iraq border. Saddam wanted to broker another treaty in which Iraqi control over those waterways would be restored. If he went to war with Iran, he could scare Iran out of invading his land, increase his popularity amongst Sunni Muslims, and repeal the Algiers Agreement in the resulting peace treaty. So, on September 22, 1980, Saddam invaded Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam funded his imperialist endeavors by lending money from the US, Soviet Union, France, and Kuwait. Perhaps Saddam's refusal to pay off the resulting debts to Washington DC is where the tensions fueling the Iraq War began.
On August 20, 1988, the Iran-Iraq War ended with no side really securing victory. Saddam now had to focus entirely on reimbursing his war debts. Kuwait proved to be a particularly troubling debtor, constantly refusing to forgive the losses when Saddam petitioned for such clemency. This, among other reasons, catalyzed Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990, hoping to entirely annex the country. The United Nations threatened to unleash severe sanctions on Iraq and its citizens if Saddam did not withdraw. Baghdad did not heed these warnings, and so sanctions on medicine, food, and other necessities were instituted on August 6, 1990. George HW Bush was especially interested in Kuwait's future. America was a strong ally of Saudi Arabia, and Bush feared that if he didn't preserve Kuwaiti independence, he would inadvertently enable an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia somewhere down the line. So, led by the US under President Bush, a UN coalition went to war with Iraq on January 17, 1991, pushing Iraqi forces out of the country by February 28, 1991. The Gulf War ended in a Kuwaiti victory!
Kuwait's independence had luckily been restored, yet UN sanctions did not budge. Throughout much of the 1990s, the sanctions remained in place, rendering the economy of the 1990s one of the worst in all of Iraqi history, and Iraq was one of the first countries to host a human civilization after the Agricultural Revolution! For this reason, the international sanctions of the 1990s - alongside arguably lingering bitterness from the Gulf War - intensified tensions between Iraq and the West. The 1990s also saw the UN create a program to help persecuted Kurds escape Iraq, amplifying these tensions. At the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, Bill Clinton also bombed some of Iraq's military arsenal, outraging Saddam, the Iraqi people, and the Iraqi army, another fact deepening tensions. The situation was about to blow up into an armed conflict.
In the months after 9/11, George HW Bush's son George W. Bush labeled 3 countries - Iran, North Korea, and Iraq - members of "the Axis of Evil." He particularly honed in on Iraq. He claimed that because of 9/11, America was a lot weaker than it was in 2000 or the 1990s. For this reason, what Bush claimed to be Saddam's connections to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as well as the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (up to and including nuclear weapons), made Baghdad a target of warranted retaliation. Saddam had no ties to al-Qaeda and there was no evidence of WMDs existing in Iraq. However, Bush did manufacture fake "proof" later debunked. This "proof" was presented by the UN by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell's testimony tricked the UN into greenlighting an American invasion of Iraq, but countries like France and Russia (rather ironic considering their later intrusions into Ukraine) were still unconvinced. But it did not matter. War was still approaching.
Bush gave Saddam an ultimatum: Resign or destroy the weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq and if neither of these steps was taken, the US would invade. On February 24, 2003, Saddam participated in an interview with Dan Rather of CBS in which he stated he would neither destroy his non-existence WMDs nor resign as leader of Iraq. Soliciting assistance from Britain under Tony Blair, Bush invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. The Iraq War had begun. Initially, it ironically seemed that the war was developing against the advantage of the United States. American soldiers had trouble finding important Iraqi military and government buildings and were running out of supplies. However, following some airlifts by Bush and Blair, the war effort began to improve. By the end of March, US troops were approaching Baghdad.
Throughout late March and early April, US forces bombed government buildings to pressure Iraq into surrender. They also took control of an airport, preventing Saddam or his officials from fleeing to other nations. On April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell to US occupation and Saddam was formally removed from office as the Iraqi leader. He fled the capital soon after. On May 1, 2003, Bush gave the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, in which he ended the combat phase of the Iraq War. He announced the ouster of Saddam Hussein but also gave a grim warning about how a power vacuum had split open in the Iraqi government. Iraq was now in shambles, and it was his job to preserve whatever peace still existed, as well as to generate stability from there.
After the Mission Accomplished speech, US troops were no longer in Iraq to topple Saddam, but to enforce an unnatural civility and order. In December 2003, Saddam was found hiding in a cave outside of a small Iraqi village. The US arrested him and brought him to be tried by the International Court of Justice. At hand was the question of ethnic cleansing. A series of massacres committed by Saddam's government against Kurdish settlements during the Iran-Iraq War was the main charge levied against him. He was easily found guilty by what some have called a kangaroo court. On December 30, 2006, Saddam was taken to a dark warehouse and executed via hanging. Around this time, it was revealed that despite the presence of American troops, Iraq had continued to descend into misery and chaos. So, at the end of 2006 and the start of 2007, Bush embarked on what was known as "the Surge", where he dramatically increased the number of US soldiers working in Iraq. This did not succeed, however, and chaos continued to intensify.
When it became apparent that the Surge too was a failure, Bush began looking into formally ending the Iraq War. In November 2008, American delegates met with the new government in Baghdad established by Bush following the removal of Saddam Hussein back in the spring of 2003. At the conference, they created a peace deal in which the US withdrawal from Iraq began. Also in November 2008, Democratic nominee Barack Obama defeated Republican nominee John McCain, replacing Bush as president on January 20, 2009. Obama worked vigorously to make sure that the US presence in Iraq was eliminated, with the final soldier leaving on December 15, 2011. The Iraq War was complete. But it was not without its lasting influence, an influence that was mostly negative.
Though it was established back in 1999, ISIS greatly benefitted from the Iraq War, as its message could better radicalize young Iraqis upset with the Western occupation. This enabled the expansion of ISIS' power and support, which itself produced another war in Iraq. At the end of 2013, ISIS began fighting with the rest of the Iraqi government in order to establish dominance over the country. By 2017 and 2018, ISIS was mostly defeated, ending the Iraqi Civil War. However, the country came far too close for comfort, bringing it near the vicinity of the very same theocracy Iran is suffering under, something which contributed to a war between those two countries all those years ago in 1980. Iraq still suffers from an incompetent, corrupt, unstable government that can't properly care for its people, and much of that can be traced to Bush's imperialist policies.
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