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Sunday marks 20 years since American and coalition forces invaded Iraq on a mission to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and find weapons of mass destruction.
Former President George W. Bush and his administration wagered to the American public and the international community that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The coalition found no such weapons, and two years later the WMD Commission, established by Bush, acknowledged in a report that the « WMD » fiasco was “one of the most public – and most damaging – intelligence failures in recent American history.”
Forces did succeed in knocking Hussein out of power, clearing the way for a fraught nation-building project that would stretch for nearly a decade.
By the U.S.’s withdrawal in 2011, the costs of the war stood high:
At least 4,480 U.S. deaths and more than 32,000 wounded
At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead
At least $806 billion spent on the war
Thousands of troops with illnesses believed to be caused by exposure to burn pits
In 2003, an American public still stunned by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks largely supported the war. But public sentiment today has shifted. A Pew Research Center survey in 2019 found 62% of Americans thought the war “wasn’t worth it.” In the same poll, 64% of veterans shared the same view.
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Bush and supporters of the war would go on to admit the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, but maintain the world would’ve been « a lot worse off » had Hussein remained in power.
