Two decades ago, U.S. air and ground forces invaded Iraq in what
then-President George W. Bush said was an effort to disarm the country,
free its people and "defend the world from grave danger."In the
late-night Oval Office address on March 19, 2003, Bush did not mention
his administration's assertion that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction. That argument — which turned out
to be based on thin or otherwise faulty intelligence — had been laid out
weeks before by Secretary of State Colin Powell at a U.N. Security
Council meeting.
Bush described the massive airstrikes on Iraq as the "opening stages of
what will be a broad and concerted campaign" and pledged that "we will
accept no outcome but victory."
However, Bush's caveat that the campaign "could be longer and more
difficult than some predict" proved prescient. In eight years of boots
on the ground, the U.S. lost some 4,600 U.S. service members, and at
least 270,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, were killed. While the invasion
succeeded in toppling Saddam, it ultimately failed to uncover any secret
stash of weapons of mass destruction. Although estimates vary, a Brown
University estimate puts the cost of the combat phase of the war at
around $2 trillion.
When Ryan Crocker, who at the time had already been U.S. ambassador to
Lebanon, Kuwait and Syria and would go on to hold the top diplomatic
post in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, first saw Bush's televised
speech announcing the start of combat operations, he was at an airport
heading back to Washington, D.C.
"I was thinking, 'Here we go,' " he recalls. But it was a sense of
dread, not excitement. Crocker wondered, "God knows where we're going."
Peter Mansoor, a colonel attending the U.S. Army War College at the
time, was concerned about his future, knowing that he'd soon be in
command of the first brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which would go
on to see action in Iraq.
"I was very interested in the outcome of the invasion and what would
happen in the aftermath," says Mansoor, who is now a military history
professor at Ohio State University. "I didn't expect the Iraqi army to
be able to put up much resistance beyond a few weeks."
Meanwhile, Marsin Alshamary, an 11-year-old Iraqi American growing up in
Minneapolis, Minn., when the invasion occurred, says "seeing planes and
bombing over where my grandparents lived made me cry." Alshamary, who
is now a Middle East policy expert at the Brookings Institution, says to
her at the time, the possibility that Saddam would be deposed seemed
"unreal."
Crocker, Mansoor and Alshamary recently shared their thoughts with NPR
on lessons learned from one of America's longest conflicts — the war in
Iraq. Here are their observations:
Wars aren't predictable. They're chaotic — and costlier than anyone
anticipates
U.S. optimism for a quick and relatively bloodless outcome in Iraq was
apparent even before the invasion.
In the months leading to the 2003 invasion, then-Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, in a radio call-in program, predicted that the coming
fight would take "five days or five weeks or five months, but it
certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." Bush, in what's
been dubbed his "mission accomplished" speech on May 1, 2003, declared
that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
Rumsfeld's prediction would prove hopelessly optimistic. In the days and
weeks after Baghdad fell, a growing insurgency took root and U.S.
forces began to come frequently under fire from hostile militias.
"They basically planned for a best-case scenario, where the Iraqi people
would cooperate with the occupation, that Iraqi units would be
available to help secure the country in the aftermath of conflict, and
that the international community would step in to help reconstruct
Iraq," he says. "All three of those assumptions were wrong."
