The Iraq disarmament crisis was claimed as one of primary issues that led to the multinational invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003.
Opposition to the Iraq War significantly occurred worldwide, both before and during the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States–led coalition, and throughout the subsequent occupation. Individuals and groups opposing the war include the governments of many nations which did not take part in the invasion, including both its land neighbors Canada and Mexico, its NATO allies in Europe such as France and Germany, as well as China and Indonesia in Asia, and significant sections of the populace in those that took part in the invasion. Opposition to the war was also widespread domestically.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a United States–led invasion of the Republic of Iraq and the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion phase began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by Coalition forces on 9 April 2003 after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May 2003 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech, after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
Richard Norman Perle is an American political advisor who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. He began his political career as a senior staff member to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. He served on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004 where he served as chairman from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush Administration before resigning due to conflict of interests.
William Ramsey Clark was an American lawyer, activist, and federal government official. A progressive, New Frontier liberal, he occupied senior positions in the United States Department of Justice under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as United States Attorney General from 1967 to 1969; previously, he was Deputy Attorney General from 1965 to 1967 and Assistant Attorney General from 1961 to 1965.
The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) was a non-governmental organization which described itself as a "distinguished group of Americans" who wanted to "free Iraq from Saddam Hussein".
Jay Montgomery Garner is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who in 2003 was appointed as Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making him the immediate replacement of Saddam Hussein as the de facto head of state of Iraq. Garner was soon replaced by Ambassador Paul Bremer and the ambassador's successor organization to ORHA, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
The 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry, the longtime U.S. senator from Massachusetts, began when he formed an exploratory committee on December 1, 2002. On September 2, 2003, he formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. After beating John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and other candidates in the primaries, he became the Democratic nominee, challenging Republican incumbent George W. Bush in the general election. Kerry selected Edwards as his running mate.
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The political leadership of the United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which were ultimately crushed by the Soviet Army, but decided against it to avoid the risk of a major war.
Kenneth Michael Pollack is an American former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military affairs. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on international relations. Currently, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.
Norman Podhoretz is an American magazine editor, writer, and conservative political commentator, who identifies his views as "paleo-neoconservative", but only “because (he’s) been one for so long”. He is a writer for Commentary magazine, and previously served as the publication's editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995.
The 2004 documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 generated controversy before, during, and after its release a few months prior to the 2004 U.S. presidential election. The film, directed by Michael Moore, criticizes the Bush administration's attempt to pursue Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as well as the Iraq War. Although Fahrenheit 9/11 was generally praised by film critics and won various awards including that year's Palme d'Or, the content was criticized by several commentators for accuracy, and lack of context. Additionally, the distributors protested Moore's inaction on unauthorized copying.
Paul Lawrence Berman is an American writer on politics and literature.
Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear (1989), a best-selling book, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
The term liberal hawk refers to a politically liberal person who supports a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy.
The rationale for the Iraq War, both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent hostilities, was controversial. The George W. Bush administration began actively pressing for military intervention in Iraq in late 2001. The primary rationalization for the Iraq War was articulated by a joint resolution of the United States Congress known as the Iraq Resolution. The US claimed the intent was to "disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people".
American support for Ba'athist Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War, in which it fought against post-revolutionary Iran, included several billion dollars' worth of economic aid, the sale of dual-use technology, military intelligence, and special operations training. The U.S. refused to sell arms to Iraq directly due to Iraq's ties to terrorist groups, but several sales of "dual-use" technology have been documented; notably, Iraq purchased 45 Bell helicopters for $200 million in 1985. Of particular interest for contemporary Iran–United States relations are accusations that the U.S. government actively encouraged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, supported by a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence and generally regarded as the conventional wisdom in the Arab world, but several scholars and former U.S. government officials deny that any such collusion occurred, and no direct documentary proof of it has been found.
Iraqgate refers to allegations that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush built up Iraq's military right up until Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, polemicist, debater and journalist who in his youth took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, joined organisations such as the International Socialists while at university and began to identify as a socialist. However, after the 11 September attacks he no longer regarded himself as a socialist and his political thinking became largely dominated by the issue of defending civilization from terrorists and against the totalitarian regimes that protect them. Hitchens nonetheless continued to identify as a Marxist, endorsing the materialist conception of history, but believed that Karl Marx had underestimated the revolutionary nature of capitalism. He sympathized with libertarian ideals of limited state interference, but considered libertarianism not to be a viable system. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, he supported the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. After 9/11, Hitchens advocated the invasion of Iraq. In the 2004 election, he very slightly favored the incumbent Republican President George W. Bush or was neutral and in 2008 he favored the Democratic candidate Barack Obama over John McCain despite being critical of both of them.
