Invasion, Insurgency and Iraq by 2009
Invasion: 20 March to 9 April 2003
The invasion of Iraq, code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, began at dawn on 20 March 2003 with cruise-missile strikes on a site in Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was wrongly believed to be sleeping. A US-led ground force of around 150,000 troops, with around 45,000 British troops in the south, crossed from Kuwait. Within three weeks the regime had collapsed. Baghdad fell on 9 April; television viewers watched US Marines and Iraqi civilians pull down a statue of Saddam in Firdos Square. On 1 May 2003, on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over under a banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’. The phrase would haunt the rest of his presidency. The invasion had been swift; the war was about to begin.
The invasion ran from 20 March to 9 April 2003 — just twenty-one days from launch to the fall of Baghdad. President Bush’s 1 May 2003 ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech declared major combat operations over. The deadliest years of the war were still ahead.
The CPA, De-Ba’athification and the Disbanding of the Army
The American occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was led by L. Paul Bremer. In May 2003 Bremer issued two orders. CPA Order 1 banned senior members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party from public-sector employment, a process called de-Ba’athification. CPA Order 2 dissolved the Iraqi army, sending around 400,000 soldiers home unpaid and armed. Together these decisions removed a generation of Sunni Arab teachers, doctors, civil servants and officers from public life and gave the future insurgency a ready-made pool of trained, humiliated recruits. Bremer believed the orders would prevent a return of the regime; later assessments — including the Chilcot Inquiry and the US Army’s own internal histories — judged them the most damaging Western decisions of the war.
Insurgency and Civil War, 2003–07
From late 2003, attacks on coalition forces escalated. The signature weapon was the improvised explosive device (IED), a roadside bomb often built from artillery shells looted from un-secured ammunition dumps. The insurgency drew in three overlapping groups: Sunni Ba’athist remnants, foreign jihadists who flowed in to fight Americans (organising under the banner of al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2004), and Shia militias linked to Iran. The bombing of the al-Askari Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006 tipped Iraq into open sectarian civil war. Death squads from the Mahdi Army cleared Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad; al-Qaeda in Iraq cleared mixed neighbourhoods of Shia. Civilian deaths reached their peak in 2006–07; the Iraq Body Count project recorded more than 29,000 documented civilian dead in 2006 alone.
In April 2004 the American programme 60 Minutes II, and the New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, published photographs taken by US military police of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. The images — hooded men forced into sexual postures, a prisoner standing on a box with electrical wires attached — circulated in global media within hours. Eleven US soldiers were court-martialled. The senior commanders responsible for prison policy faced no criminal charges. The damage was strategic: the photographs gave al-Qaeda in Iraq the recruitment imagery it needed and stripped the United States of the human-rights framing that had been part of the case for war. Many historians treat April 2004 as the moment the war was politically lost, even as it had nearly five more years to run.
Saddam Captured, the Constitution and the Elections
On 13 December 2003, US forces found Saddam in a hidden cellar near Tikrit. He was tried by an Iraqi tribunal for the 1982 Dujail massacre of Shia villagers and hanged on 30 December 2006. The political timetable for replacing his regime ran in parallel. A transitional government took office in June 2004; a constitutional referendum was held in October 2005; the first full parliamentary elections under the new constitution took place in December 2005. Around 78% of voters turned out despite intimidation. The new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, took office in 2006 at the head of a Shia-dominated coalition. Sunni political participation was thin and would remain so. The institutions were in place; the legitimacy that should have come with them was not.
Global Blowback: Madrid, London and Beyond
The Iraq War damaged Western security elsewhere. On 11 March 2004 ten coordinated bombs on Madrid commuter trains killed 191 people; the attackers, inspired by al-Qaeda, cited Spanish participation in Iraq. On 7 July 2005 four British suicide bombers attacked the London Underground and a Number 30 bus, killing 52 people; the recordings the bombers left explicitly cited British policy in Iraq. The 2005 Bali bombings, the 2007 Glasgow airport attack, and a string of disrupted plots in Britain and Germany were all tied directly or rhetorically to the Iraq conflict. The argument that the invasion would reduce global terrorism failed its first test within a year of the fall of Baghdad.
In January 2007 Bush announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops, mostly to Baghdad, under General David Petraeus. Known as the surge, the strategy paired more troops with a counter-insurgency doctrine focused on protecting civilians rather than hunting fighters. At the same time, Sunni tribes in Anbar province turned against the brutality of al-Qaeda in Iraq and accepted American support to fight back — the so-called Sunni Awakening. Civilian deaths fell sharply in 2008. The surge stabilised the war but did not resolve the political settlement; the underlying Sunni–Shia compromise was never reached.
Iraq by the End of the Bush Presidency
When Bush left office on 20 January 2009 Iraq was no longer at the peak of its civil war but had not been stabilised. The Status of Forces Agreement, signed by Bush and Maliki in November 2008, set the timetable for US combat troops to leave by 31 December 2011. Around 4,400 American servicemen had been killed in Iraq, and 179 British. Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 stood, by Iraq Body Count’s documented count, at over 100,000, with broader estimates from epidemiological studies running into several hundred thousand. Around 4 million Iraqis had been displaced internally or as refugees. The Maliki government leaned increasingly on Iranian backing and excluded Sunni representation. Five years later, in 2014, the militants who had become Islamic State (ISIS) would seize Mosul. The Iraq War of 2003–09 cannot honestly be called over by 2009 — merely paused, with the conditions for the next round already in place.
By the end of the Bush presidency on 20 January 2009, the US-led invasion had cost around 4,400 American and 179 British military lives, more than 100,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths, and the displacement of around four million Iraqis. The 2007 surge and Sunni Awakening had reduced violence, but the political settlement remained unfinished; ISIS would emerge from this unresolved war within five years.