Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (95 page)

November
In the aftermath of 9/11, a small group of senior U.S. military planners is instructed to begin planning for a possible invasion of Iraq.

2002

July
23 The “Downing Street memo”—prepared by a senior British intelligence official and subsequently leaked—states, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” (
The Sunday Times
of London publishes the leaked memo in May 2005.)

September
8 In a speech, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice describes the threat posed by Iraq: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Iraq] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

November
27 After the UN Security Council declares Iraq in breach of a disarmament resolution, Iraq allows weapons inspectors to return to the country in search of banned weapons.

2003

January
28 In his State of the Union Address, President Bush declares, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

February
The army general Eric Shinseki testifies to a Senate committee that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be required to stabilize Iraq. Shinseki is publicly rebuked by both Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and one of Bush’s security officials, Paul Wolfowitz.

February
6 Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the UN Security Council to present the American case for war. The Security Council rejects an explicit authorization for the use of force.

March 18
6 Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the UN Security Council to present the American case for war. The Security Council rejects an explicit authorization for the use of force.

March 18
United Nations weapons inspectors leave Iraq.

March 19
Operation Iraqi Freedom commences with air strikes. Most Iraqi forces melt into the civilian population; Iraqi forces, including the feared Republican Guard, are quickly overwhelmed, but there is no evidence of any chemical or biological weapon used by Iraqi forces.

April 9
U.S. Marines topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in a major square in Baghdad.

April
Order in Iraq begins to break down amid widespread looting. The national archives and museum and all government ministries, except the ministry of oil, are looted. Asked at a press conference about the looting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “Stuff happens” and “Freedom is untidy.”

April 1
Special Forces rescue Private First Class Jessica Lynch, who had been captured by Iraqi forces on March 23. The Pentagon, desperate for positive news, inflates her story into heroic proportions. Lynch is given an honorable medical discharge later in April. Along with the media, she will eventually accuse the government of embellishing her story as part of a propaganda effort by the Pentagon.

May 2
Aboard the USS
Abraham
Lincoln
, under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” President Bush delivers an address in which he declares the “end of major combat operations” in Iraq.

May 6
L. Paul Bremer is appointed to supervise the occupation of Iraq, replacing General Jay Garner, as chaos sweeps Iraq. On May 9, Bremer disbands the entire Iraqi military and intelligence services. He also announces that some 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party are prohibited from any government work.

July 6
Former ambassador Joseph Wilson publishes an article on the
New York Times
op-ed page in which he states that Saddam Hussein could not obtain uranium from sources in Africa, contradicting the claim made by President Bush in the State of the Union Address a few months earlier, in January. At this time, Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA operative; her classified identity will soon (July 14) be revealed to the press. The leak of her name and identity will eventually be traced to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby will be convicted (in March 2007) of four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to investigators and sentenced to thirty months in prison; but President Bush will commute his sentence in July 2007.

August 19
A bombing attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad kills more than twenty people, including the UN special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The UN closes its Iraq mission.

December 13
Saddam Hussein is captured in his hometown, Tikrit.

2004

January 4
The Bush administration concedes that its prewar arguments about extensive stockpiles of WMD appear to have been mistaken.

March 31
Four American employees of a private security contractor, Blackwater, are killed in the city of Fallujah and their bodies are hung from a bridge. The incident leads to a bloody siege of the city, which has become the center of an insurgency by Sunni Iraqis, many of them former loyalists of Saddam Hussein.

April 30
Photographs of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison abused by U.S. soldiers are first published. Seven soldiers are later convicted of torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, but no senior officers are charged or punished.

May 8
An interim constitution for Iraq is ratified.

November
President Bush is reelected for a second term, defeating Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

2005

January 30
Iraqi national elections are held but are largely boycotted by Sunni political parties.

March
A presidential commission concludes that “not one bit” of prewar intelligence about chemical, biological, and other weapons in Iraq was accurate.

August 6
In neighboring Iran, the hard-line Islamist mayor of Teheran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is elected president.

2006

February 22
A mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims, is bombed. The attack leads to a dramatic escalation of sectarian violence, with Shiites attacking Sunnis in large-scale killings.

May 20
Nouri al-Maliki takes over as prime minister of Iraq.

November 7
In U.S. midterm elections, the Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives, largely as a result of growing opposition to the war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld steps down and is replaced by Robert Gates, a moderate who had been privately critical of the war.

December 6
The Iraq Study Group, formed earlier to analyze the situation in Iraq, concludes that it “is grave and deteriorating” and “U.S. forces seem to be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end.”

December 30
Following separate trials for “crimes against humanity” and genocide, Saddam Hussein is hanged.

2007

January 10
The presidential campaign to replace George Bush begins; President Bush announces a “surge” of additional troops to Iraq. General David Petraeus is assigned to implement the new strategy.

2008

November 4
Barack Obama, a critic of the Iraq war who has voted against it in the Senate and campaigned to end it, is elected president. Obama asks Secretary of Defense Gates to remain in the post.

November 27
Iraq’s government approves an agreement calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by December 31, 2011. By September 2009, the U.S. troop presence in Iraq will decline to 130,000. (There will still be tens of thousands of private American contractors doing Defense Department work in Iraq at that time.)

2009

June 30
American troops begin to withdraw from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities as part of the drawdown.

2010

March
Iraqi parliamentary elections are held, and despite bombings, there is 62 percent turnout.

August 31
President Obama declares an end to the seven-year combat mission in Iraq. However, some 50,000 American forces remain in the country to provide security and training for Iraqi forces. More than 4,400 American soldiers and more than 70,000 Iraqis lost their lives in the conflict, according to figures cited by the
New York Times.

October 1
After months of political haggling since the March elections, Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki was reelected. The party of anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, the exiled religious leader whose forces had once battled American and coalition forces in several cities, backed Maliki. The deadline for withdrawing the rest of the American forces remained December 2011.

(Sources:
No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos,
Council on Foreign Relations;
The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2010.
)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

CHARLES H. FERGUSON
, documentary filmmaker,
No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos
(2008):

Yet never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine that the occupation of Iraq would be conducted with such arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence as it was. Despite all my training and experience, which included lessons in skepticism, I would have laughed if someone had told me before the war, look, it’s going to be like this: They won’t start any planning for the occupation at all until two months before the war, and then they’ll start completely from scratch. They’ll exclude the State Department and CIA people who know the most about the country. They won’t have any telephones or e-mail for months after they arrive in Iraq. Our troops will stand by as nearly every major building in the country is looted, destroyed, and burned. They will spend the first month preparing to install an Iraqi government, restart the administration of the country, and recall the Iraqi army for use in security and reconstruction. And then, with no consultation or warning, in a one-week period, a newly appointed head of the U.S. occupation will reverse all those decisions, crippling the administration of the country and throwing half a million men into the street, destitute. As an insurgency builds, they will deny its existence and refuse to negotiate, even when the leaders of the insurgency signal a desire for compromise. They will airlift $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills into the country, with no accounting controls, and three-quarters of it will remain permanently unaccounted for.

Must Read:
The Assassin’s Gate
by George Packer;
Cobra II
by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor;
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
by Thomas E. Ricks;
The Dark Side
by Jane Mayer;
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
by Seymour M. Hersh;
The Forever War
by Dexter Filkins.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

MILDRED LOVING
, June 2007:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.