Below are three passage that discuss the causes and events of the Iraq war. Pick two passages and write an essay that compares and contrasts each passage's respective:
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| The invasion occurred as part of a declared war against international terrorism and its sponsors under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The winding down of U.S. involvement in Iraq accelerated under President Barack Obama. The U.S. formally withdrew all combat troops from Iraq by December 2011. The Bush administration based its rationale for the war principally on the assertion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that there was concern about an active WMD program, and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States and its coalition allies. The United States responded with a troop surge in 2007, a build up of 170,000 troops. The surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq’s government and military, and was largely a success. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The invasion led to the collapse of the Baathist government; Saddam was captured during Operation Red Dawn in December of that same year and executed by a military court three years later. With no stay-behind agreement or advisers left in Iraq, a new power vacuum was created and led to the rise of ISIS. Many violent insurgent groups were supported by Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Iraq war began on 19 March 2003, when the U.S., joined by the U.K. and several coalition allies, launched a "shock and awe" bombing campaign. An estimated 151,000 to 600,000 or more Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict. The U.S. became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition; the insurgency and many dimensions of the civil armed conflict continue. In October 2002, President Bush obtained congressional approval from a Democrat-led Senate and Republican-led House authorizing war-making powers. The power vacuum following Saddam’s demise and the mismanagement of the occupation led to widespread sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis, as well as a lengthy insurgency against U.S. and coalition forces. Iraqi forces were quickly overwhelmed as U.S. forces swept through the country. | A combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. President Bush stated that the “United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." The U.S. placed around 200,000 troops on Iraq's border as a warning to Saddam Hussein. President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on 1 May, 2003. Despite the defeat of conventional military forces in Iraq, an insurgency or rebellion continued with an intense guerrilla war in the nation in the years since military victory was announced, resulting in thousands of coalition military, insurgent and civilian deaths. On 29 January 2002, a few months after the attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush called Iraq part of an "axis of evil." It appeared that there was international unity on this issue. On 17 March 2003, President Bush declared an end to diplomacy and issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, giving the Iraqi president 48 hours to leave Iraq. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and other countries objected to this build up towards war. Coalition forces were able to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and capture Iraq’s major cities in just three weeks, sustaining few casualties. The United States eventually went to war against Iraq without UN approval. Other world leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, also tried to extend inspections and give Iraq more time to do what had been asked of them. This would suggest that international relations were slightly strained as not all wanted to take direct action. President Bush suggested that he would soon turn his foreign-policy attention toward Saddam Hussein's regime, which continued to "flaunt its hostility toward America", "support terror" and break its international agreements. In September 2002 President Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly, telling its representatives that if they failed to enforce the UN resolutions against Iraq, the United States would enforce the resolutions on its own. In early 2003, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that Iraq was continuing to hinder UN inspections and that it still had WMD. In response to [The U.S.] show of force, Saddam Hussein agreed to allow UN inspectors to return to Iraq. As a result of President Bush’s appeal, the UN Security Council voted unanimously on 7 November 2002 to present Iraq with an ultimatum and a 30-day deadline. The deadline came and went - however the UN suggested allowing Saddam Hussein more time. President Bush stated that the U.S. would "work closely” with their coalition partners to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. | Iraq fit the bill both because it was more powerful than Afghanistan and because it had been in neoconservative crosshairs since George HW Bush declined to press on to Baghdad in 1991. A regime remaining defiant despite a military defeat was barely tolerable before 9/11. Did the US really start a war - one that cost trillions of dollars, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destabilised the region, and helped create the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - just to prove a point? Intelligence is a complicated, murky enterprise, the argument goes, and given the foreboding shadow of the 9/11 attacks, the US government reasonably, if tragically, misread the evidence on the dangers Saddam posed. In a 2002 column, Jonah Goldberg coined the "Ledeen Doctrine", named after neoconservative historian Michael Ledeen. The "doctrine" states: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." It may be discomfiting to Americans to say nothing of millions of Iraqis that the Bush administration spent their blood and treasure for a war inspired by the Ledeen Doctrine. Sixteen years after the United States invaded Iraqand left a trail of destruction and chaos in the country and the region, one aspect of the war remains criminally under examined: why was it fought in the first place? The only way to send a message so menacing was a swashbuckling victory in war. Since we know the administration was engaged in a widespread campaign of deception and propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war, there is little reason to believe them. As prison bullies know, a fearsome reputation is not acquired by beating up the weakest in the yard. Or as Rumsfeld put it on the evening of 9/11, "We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kinds of attacks." That the administration used the fear of WMDs and terrorism to fight a war for hegemony should be acknowledged by an American political establishment eager to rehabilitate George W Bush amid the rule of Donald Trump, not least because John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, seems eager to employ similar methods to similar ends in Iran. Indeed, some US economists consider the notion that the Bush administration deliberately misled the country and the globe into war in Iraq to be a "conspiracy theory", on par with beliefs that President Barack Obama was born outside the US or that the Holocaust did not occur. What did the Bush administration hope to get out of the war? The official, and widely-accepted, story remains that Washington was motivated by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. A senior administration official told a reporter, off the record, that "Iraq is not just about Iraq", rather "it was of a type", including Iran, Syria, and North Korea. A quick and decisive victory in the heart of the Arab world would send a message to all countries, especially to recalcitrant regimes such as Syria, Libya, Iran, or North Korea, that American hegemony was here to stay. Put simply, the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to (re)establish American standing as the world's leading power. |