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Twenty years ago now on March 20, 2003the international coalition led by the United States, and made up of the United Kingdom and Spain with the support of the Kurdish Peshmergas in the north, began the invasion of Iraq.
fighter jets and precision missile strikes, as well as the buildup of close to 300,000 military forces by the war alliance against Iraq, knocked out the Iraqi defense capability in a few days. The war itself lasted barely five weeks, but the subsequent occupation lasted more than 8 years and 8 months. US troops did not withdraw from Iraq until 2011 in a conflict that left a balance of 15,000 soldiers killed in combatthe vast majority of them Iraqis.
The collapse of the Ba’athist regime upon the arrival of the international attack coalition led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, who ruled from 1979 to 2003, in what is known as “Operation Red Dawn” in December of that same year, although he was not executed. until three years later, in 2006.
The sudden power vacuum that led to Saddam’s downfall led to a civil war between Shias and Sunnis, parallel to the prolonged insurgency against the coalition forces that occupied the country. The United States responded to this contingency by maintaining on the ground an accumulation of 170,000 soldiers in 2007thus giving greater control to the Iraqi government and army.
The NGO Human Rights Watch attributed between 250,000 and 290,000 deaths and disappearances to the Saddam regime, although the United States government affirmed that the dictator killed 300,000 Iraqis, including 180,000 Kurds in Anfal and 60,000 Shiites in the 1991 uprising.
It was precisely then, in 1991, when tensions between Iraq and the United States began, when US troops undertook the so-called “Operation Desert Storm” to force the Iraqi military to withdraw from Kuwait.
And seven years later, in 1998, the United States alerted the United Kingdom that Iraq was in possession of lethal chemical weapons. The famous weapons of mass destruction. Reason why, at that time, an intervention was carried out, but it was on a smaller scale.
The full-scale military invasion was finally carried out on March 20, 2003 under operation “New Dawn”coalition formed by the United States of George W. Bushthe United Kingdom of Tony Blair and the Spain of Jose Maria Aznar.
Bush Jr. was said to have mainly two reasons for doing so. On the one hand, finish what Bush senior had started during his tenure. And it is that President George HW Bush (1989-1993) is recognized for the legacy of having defeated Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, as well as for having presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification. And, on the other, eliminate one enemy from many allies in the area, strategically decisive in the Middle East.
The three allied countries, led by the United States, argued the same thing that they had already stated before the General Assembly of the United Nations when requesting the disarmament of Iraq: the search and destruction of the alleged weapons of mass destruction. Aznar himself insisted from Spain on “being sure that they would appear”.
They never showed up. But neither did the United States seem to need any excuse to justify the decision carried out by President Bush from the White House just a few months after he first took office, and long before the 9/11 attacks.
In reality, for the United States, the issue of weapons of mass destruction was secondary, always behind a much deeper, extensive campaign to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Afterwards, American society, very hurt by the tragic attacks on its own home on September 11, 2001, unlike European countries, did not report to the Administration nor did he ask for explanations about the military intervention in Iraq.
It was President Bush himself who also announced, in 2008, the withdrawal of US troops in combat from Iraq, which was fully carried out under the mandate of Barack Obama on December 18, 2011.
As was the case with Afghanistan after twenty years of prolonged US military presence in the country, the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war is reminiscent of many factors similar to the wound it left open, less than two years ago, the chaotic definite withdrawal of US troops from Kabul. Withdrawal not without controversy, inherited from the agreement sealed by Donald Trump with the Taliban and completed by the Biden Administration. Who, by the way, highlighted a few days ago the role of his eldest son in one of the most remembered wars in the United States.
“My son, my number one son who should be the one here as president, not me”, he recalled about his son, Beau Biden, this week. “He volunteered to go with his unit to Iraq for a year. He was one of the fittest men in his unit. He came back (home). He came back with stage four glioblastoma, ”explained the president of the United States. Although his son was able to return to the country after fighting in the Iraq war, he ended up losing the battle of his life due to a severe illness. “There is nothing like losing someone to cancer. It’s like losing a piece of your soul, losing a part of you, ”Biden opened up when talking about his son.
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