Question

When President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, he took a unilateral military action. His stated purpose was to increase US national security. Presidents Clinton and Obama favored more multilateral efforts when intervening in countries such as Kosovo and Libya. Is there a justification for the US to engage in unilateral rather than multilateral military action overseas?

Answer 1

These were the words of Mohammed al Douri, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, in April 2003. When asked what he meant by this comment, he responded: “the war”. After three weeks of fighting, he admitted that the Republic of Iraq did not, for the time being, did not even exist.

In the morning hours of March, 2003, the U.S. and its allies initiated the invasion ofIraq. On April 9,U.S. forces formally occupied Baghdad, and on December 13 the same year, Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator was captured while hiding in a cellar in the outskirts of Tikrit.

After the first Gulf War in 1991 Iraq was obliged by the U.N. to get rid of all its biological and toxic weapons. This Security Council Resolution also demanded the restoration of Kuwait’s independence and the implementation of sanctions against Iraq. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) performed inspections in Iraq to make sure that the conditions of the peace agreement that followed the first Gulf War were carried out. The weapons inspectors were thrown out of Iraqin December of 1998, which lead to Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets.

The mission was to strike military and security targets in Iraq that contributed to the country’s ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction. The disagreement concerned the U.N. inspectors’ access to various ‘sensitive sites’ and presidential palaces. The weapons inspectors were not let back into Iraq until November 2002, after the U.N. Security Council had passed its resolution 1441.

 

Answer 2

Explanation:

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was 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,[24] 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. 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", 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.[25]