2003 Invasion of Iraq
Support and opposition
The Bush administration claimed that the
U.S.-led occupation of Iraq included 49 nations, a group that was
frequently referred to as the "coalition
of the willing". These nations provided combat troops, support
troops, and logistical support for the invasion. The nations contributing
combat forces were, roughly: United States (250,000), United Kingdom
(45,000), Australia (2,000), Denmark (200), and Poland (54). Ten other
countries were known to have offered small numbers of noncombat forces,
mostly either medical teams and specialists in decontamination. In
several of these countries a majority of the public was opposed to the
war. In
Spain polls reported at one time a 90% opposition to the war.
Popular opposition to war on Iraq led to
global protests, and the war was criticized by
Belgium,
Russia,
France, the
People's Republic of China,
Germany,
Switzerland,
The Vatican,
India,
Indonesia,
Malaysia,
Brazil,
Mexico, the
Arab League, the
African Union and others.
There is a controversy about the question whether the US intervention
broke international law. The Bush administration thinks that the UN
Security Council Resolutions authorizing the
1991 invasion gave legal authority to use "...all necessary
means...", which is diplomatic code for going to war. This war ended with
a cease fire instead of a permanent peace treaty. Their view was that
Iraq had violated the terms of the ceasefire by breaching two key
conditions and thus made the invasion of Iraq a legal continuation of the
earlier war. To support this stance, one has to "reactivate" the war
resolution from 1991; if a war resolution can be reactivated ten years
after the fact, it would imply that almost any nation that has ever been
at war that ended in a ceasefire (such as
Korea) could have the war restarted if any other nation felt at any
time that they were no longer meeting the conditions of the ceasefire
that ended that war. Since the majority of the United Nations security
council members (both permanent and rotating) did not support the attack,
it appears that they viewed the attack as not being valid under the 1991
resolution.
Resolution 1441, drafted and accepted unanimously the year before the
invasion, threatened "serious consequences" to Iraq in case Iraq did not
comply with all conditions.
Russia,
People's Republic of China, and
France made clear in a joint statement that this did not authorize
the use of force but a further resolution was needed.
Several nations say the attack violated
international law as a war of aggression since it lacked the validity
of a
U.N. Security Council resolution to authorize military force. The
Egyptian former United Nations Secretary General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali called the intervention a violation of the UN
charter.
The United States and United Kingdom claim it was a legal action which
they were within their rights to undertake. Along with
Poland and
Australia, the invasion was supported by the governments of several
European nations, including the
Czech Republic,
Denmark,
Portugal,
Italy,
Hungary, and
Spain. Saudi Foreign Minister
Prince Saud said U.S. military could not use Saudi Arabia's soil in
any way to attack Iraq. ([25]
After ten years of U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, cited among reasons by
Saudi-born
Osama bin Laden for his
al-Qaeda attacks on America on
September 11, 2001, most of U.S. forces were withdrawn in 2003. ([26]
According to the
New York Times, the invasion secretly received support from
Saudi Arabia, which provided some airbases and tens of millions of
dollars in discounted oil, gas, and fuel.
[27]
Many people regarded the attack on Iraq to be hypocritical, when other
nations such as
Israel are also in breach of UN resolutions and have nuclear weapons;
this argument is controversial
[28] as Iraq's history of actually using chemical weapons (against
Iran and the Kurdish population in Iraq) suggested at the time that Iraq
was a far greater threat. Some claim, however, that this in turn is
hypocritical, since the USA delivered the chemicals in the first place,
even when well aware of what it was being used for. It is questionable
whether these crimes were a mere excuse for the war so many years later
and given that no weapons of mass destruction can be found.
Although Iraq was known to have pursued an active nuclear weapons
development program previously, as well tried to procure materials and
equipment for their manufacture, these weapons and material have yet to
be discovered. This casts doubt on some of the accusations against Iraq,
despite previous UN assertions that Iraq likely harbored such weapons,
and that Iraq failed to document and give UN inspectors access to areas
suspected of illegal weapons production. However, some believe that the
weapons were moved into
Syria and
Lebanon.
In a poll conducted by western media 51% of Iraqis stated they opposed
the foreign forces occupying Iraq, while 39% supported it. Over 65% of
the 2,500 Iraqis polled said that their lives were better than before the
war. 48% of Iraqis felt that the U.S.-led coalition was right to invade,
compared with 39% said it was wrong. People were evenly divided on
whether the invasion had humiliated or liberated Iraq. More than 40% said
they had no confidence whatsoever in the British and U.S. forces, and 51%
opposed the presence of any coalition forces in Iraq. Nearly 20% said
attacks on foreign forces were acceptable, 14% said the same about
attacks on the civilian administrators of the Coalition Provisional
Authority and 10% on foreigners working with the CPA. A narrow majority
said life was better without Saddam.([29]
([30]
In
January 25,
2004,
al Mada, a daily newspaper in Iraq, published a list of individuals
and organizations who it says received oil sales contracts via the UN's
Oil for Food program, from the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein.
The list, which has caused the launch of a United Nations investigation
on the
Oil for food program, has raised many concerns due to its similarity
to other forgeries to come out of Iraq since last May. There has long
been speculation from conservative circles and anecdotal evidence that
the Oil For Food program was being mismanaged and used to buy Hussein's
regime covert international support and increase his personal fortune.
See
Oil for food for more.
Hussein Family Whereabouts
Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003 by the
U.S.
Army's
4th Infantry Division during
Operation Red Dawn. His sons
Uday and
Qusay were killed earlier in 2003 during a raid by the
U.S.
101st Airborne Divisio
Related slogans and terms
This campaign has featured a variety of new and weighted terminology,
much coined by the U.S. government and then repeated by the media. The
name "Operation Iraqi Freedom", for example, expresses one viewpoint of
the purpose of the invasion. Also notable was the exclusive usage of
"regime" to refer to the Saddam Hussein government (see also
regime change), and "death
squads" to refer to
fedayeen paramilitary forces. Members of the Hussein government were
called by disparaging
nicknames - e.g., "Chemical Ali" (Ali
Hassan al-Majid), "Comical Ali" (Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf), "Mrs Anthrax" (Huda
Salih Mahdi Ammash) - for
propaganda purposes and because
Western peoples are unfamiliar with
Arabic names.
Other terminology introduced or popularized during the war include:
Shock and awe - The strategy of focusing on reducing the enemy's will
to fight through a display of overwhelming force.
"embedding" - process of assigning reporters to particular military units
"coalition
of the willing"
untidiness - Rumsfeld's term for the looting and unrest which followed
the government's collapse
Many slogans and terms coined have come to be used against the
2000-? US
administration in the 2004 US Federal election, especially by
online media.
Media coverage
Main article:
2003 invasion of Iraq media coverage
Media coverage of this war was different in certain ways from that of the
Gulf War. The Pentagon established the policy of "embedding"
reporters with military units. Viewers in the United States were able to
watch U.S. tanks rolling into Baghdad live on television, with a split
screen image of the Iraqi Minister of Information claiming that U.S.
forces were not in the city. Many foreign observers of the media and
especially the television coverage in the USA felt that it was
excessively partisan and in some cases "gung-ho".
Another difference was the wide and independent coverage in the
World Wide Web demonstrating that for web-surfers in rich countries
and the elites in poorer countries, the Internet has become mature as a
medium, giving about half a billion people access to different versions
of events.
However, the coverage itself was intrinsically biased by the fact that
Internet penetration in Iraq was already very weak (estimate of 12,000
users in Iraq in 2002
[31] and the deliberate destruction of Iraqi telecommunication
facilities by US forces made internet communication even more difficult.
Different versions of truth by people who have equal ignorance of
first-hand, raw data are by definition a very biased substitute for
original, first-hand reports from people living locally. The World Wide
Web did deliver some first-hand reports from
bloggers such as
Salam Pax.
Al-Jazeera, the
Qatar-based news network, which was formed in 1996, gained a lot of
worldwide attention for its coverage of the war. Their broadcasts were
popular in much of the Arab world, but also to some degree in western
nations, with major American networks such as
CNN and
MSNBC re-broadcasting some of their coverage. Al-Jazeera was
well-known for their graphic footage of civilian casualties, which
American news media branded as overly sensationalistic. The English
website of Al-Jazeera was brought down during the middle of the Iraq war
by hackers who saw its coverage as casting a negative view on the
American cause. Al-Jazeera continues to report alleged atrocities by
American troops.
Many individuals have claimed that European coverage of the 2003 invasion
of Iraq was not as unbiased as leading European press agencies led their
readers and viewers to believe, pointing out that while people in the US
were generally not too terribly surprised by the swift victory of the
Coalition over the Iraqi army, most people in Europe and the Middle East
were dumbfounded that despite a steady stream of negative press coverage
on the Coalitions successes, the Iraqi army was defeated in just over
three weeks. Military leaders shut off the BBC connection to the
HMS Ark Royal after grumbling among sailors that it was biased in
favor of Iraqi reports.
[32]
Last December, after
Saddam Hussein's capture, the BBC issued a directive to all of its
journalists that Saddam Hussein no longer be refereed to as the "former
Dictator" and be refereed to as the "deposed former president" in all
news stories. The BBC’s reasoning for this was because Hussein had been
elected with over 99% of the votes, it would not be accurate to refer to
him as a dictator, since according to the BBC, he was the elected
president of Iraq.
French journalist
Alain Hertoghe published a book accusing the French press in
particular and the European press in general of not being objective in
its coverage of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Hertoghe's book,
La Guerre a Outrances (The War of Outrages), criticizes French press
coverage of the war as being pessimistic of the US led Coalition's chance
of success and continually focusing on challenges faced during the
invasion. Hertoghe also claims in his book that the European media became
so wrapped up in its own particular biases against the United States that
they fed disinformation to their readers and viewers and misled them as
to the unfolding events. The European coverage's concerns about the
military becoming bogged down in Iraq and the war ending badly seem to
have come true, at least for the time being. Since being published,
Hertoghe has been fired from his position at French newspaper
La Croix and only one major French newspaper has written a review for
his book.
International initiatives such as
http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h0444e1w/massmail.htm protested against
the U.S. media for downplaying and misinterpreting protests as
antiamericanism and accused them of foul language such as calling Chirac
"A balding Joan of Arc in drag" the French "frogeating weasels" (New
York Post) or stating that
"Chirac and his poodle Putin have severely damaged the United Nations"
Questions are also raised about U.S. media coverage given that in the
U.S. pre-war polls showed that a majority of the population believed that
Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks although none of the terrorists
was Iraqi and no proofs of an Iraqi connection to the attack are known.
Many protesters did display hostile attitudes toward both the United
States and Israel and many Arab and Mid Eastern showed overt sympathies
towards Saddam Hussein.
Peter Arnett, who had won the
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1966 for his coverage
of the war in Vietnam was fired by
MSNBC and
National Geographic after he had declared in an interview with the
Iraqi information ministry that he believed the U.S. strategy of "shock
and awe" had failed. He also went on to tell Iraqi State TV that he had
told "Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces, the
determination of the government, and the willingness to fight for their
country", and that reports from Baghdad about civilian casualties had
helped antiwar protesters undermine the Bush administration's strategy.
The interview was given 10 days before the fall of Baghdad, more than 500
US soldiers have since been killed, in addition to over 18,000 medical
evacuations for 11,700 patients
[33]
On April 2, 2003, in a speech given by
British Home Secretary
David Blunkett while in
New York City, Blunkett also commented on what he believed to be
sympathetic and corrupt reporting of Iraq by Arab news sources. He told
the audience that "It's hard to get the true facts if the reporters of
Al Jazeera are actually linked into, and are only there because they
are provided with facilities and support from the regime." This statement
caused editorials in British left-wing newspapers calling for Blunkett's
resignation.
Iraq
War casualties
US Casualties returning to Dover AFB in a C130
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