“The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons, for over a decade.” “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror,” he said. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began making the case for why the United States might need to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. (Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images) The path to war: From the ‘axis of evil’ to a ‘mushroom cloud’ Bush told the nation in his first State of the Union address in 2002. “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror,” President George W. military action was built, at least in part, on a foundation of falsehoods. Two decades after the war began, a review of Pew Research Center surveys on the war in Iraq shows that support for U.S. In the months leading up to the war, sizable majorities of Americans believed that Iraq either possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them, that Iraq was closely tied to terrorism – and even that Hussein himself had a role in the 9/11 attacks. Two decades later, debate continues about whether the administration was the victim of flawed intelligence, or whether Bush and his senior advisers deliberately misled the public about its WMD capabilities, in particular. on 9/11.Īs numerous investigations by independent and governmental commissions subsequently found, there was no factual basis for either of these assertions. Two of the administration’s arguments proved especially powerful, given the public’s mood: first, that Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), a shorthand for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and second, that it supported terrorism and had close ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, which had attacked the U.S. These attitudes represented “a strong endorsement of the prospective use of force compared with other military missions in the post-Cold War era,” Pew Research Center noted at the time.īush and senior members of his administration then spent more than a year outlining the dangers that they claimed Iraq posed to the United States and its allies. troops already fighting in Afghanistan, large majorities of Americans favored the use of military force in Iraq to oust Hussein from power and to destroy terrorist groups in Somalia and Sudan. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans were extraordinarily accepting of the possible use of military force as part of what Bush called the “global war on terror.”īy early 2002, with U.S. Still reeling from the horrors of the Sept. The administration’s success in these efforts was the result of several factors, not least of which was the climate of public opinion at the time. Bush and his administration marshaled wide backing for the use of military force in Iraq among both the public and Congress. Throughout 2002 and early 2003, President George W. military action at the start of the conflict and, perhaps more importantly, in the months leading up to it. The bleak retrospective judgments on the war obscure the breadth of public support for U.S. Majorities of military veterans, including those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, came to the same conclusion. As Americans looked back on the war four years ago, 62% said it was not worth fighting. Yet the military campaign that began so auspiciously ended up deeply dividing Americans and alienating key U.S. The war began March 19, 2003, with an overwhelming show of American military might, described by the unforgettable phrase “shock and awe.” Within weeks, the United States achieved the primary objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the military operation was called, ousting the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It was the start of an eight-year conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. Twenty years ago this month, the United States launched a major military invasion of Iraq, marking the second time it fought a war in that country in a little more than a decade.
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