The Collapse
On April 9 the world witnessed
the most striking image of the war: In the center of Baghdad, in a scene
reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (the wall that had separated
East and West Germany since the end of World War II), Iraqi citizens with help
from U.S. Marines toppled a towering bronze statue of Saddam Hussein. As the
statue came crashing to the ground, a crowd of jubilant Iraqis cheered loudly, danced
for joy, and hit the statue with their shoes, a gesture of contempt in Iraq. At
this moment, psychologically at least, the regime of Saddam Hussein collapsed. Brigadeer
General Vincent K. Brooks summarized the victory at a briefing at U.S. command
headquarters, stating, “Today the regime is in disarray. The capital city has
been added to those places where the regime has lost control.” Finally, U.S.
troops made an assault on Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, considered to be
the last holdout for remnants of forces loyal to his regime. Tikrit was expected
to pose a significant obstacle to coalition forces, but instead it was taken on
April 14 with little opposition. Finally, on April 15, 2003, military officials
at the U.S. Pentagon said the main fighting in Iraq was finished, and President
Bush declared that “the regime of Saddam Hussein is no more.”
It was clear, unfortunately, that
Saddam Hussein had likely survived the attack on his country. U.S. forces,
however, had no idea where Hussein was hiding. Rumors abounded, suggesting that
he had fled to Syria, that he was hiding in Tikrit, or that he was still in
Baghdad. Wherever he and his supporters were, the United States badly wanted to
find and destroy them, to ease the minds of still-frightened Iraqis who had lived
under his brutal regime for decades and to ensure that he could not make an effort
to return to power. Later that week, on April 10,American forces attacked and
later bombed a mosque in Baghdad where Hussein was reported to have been seen.
Some claimed that Hussein or one of his aides had been hit in the earlier bombing
and had been taken to the mosque, suffering from wounds. Neighbors claimed
Hussein had visited the mosque the day before: “Saddam was here, and I kissed
him,” one man said, “People were kissing his feet. They were cheering. There were
200 people there.” and a former chief of Iraqi intelligence, who is believed to
have helped Hussein hide billions of dollars in other countries. A few days
later, Hussein’s son-in-law Jamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan surrendered; he served
as deputy head of tribal affairs and was involved in the special security
organization headed by Saddam’s son Qusay. As time passed, others were taken
into custody, including Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister and public
spokesman for the regime; General Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, Hussein’s top
aide; and many other high-level government officials and prominent scientists. Saddam
Hussein, however, remained unaccounted for. Finally, on April 30 a London-based
Arabic newspaper,Al
Quds al Arabi, printed an ominous handwritten letter said to be written and signed by
Saddam Hussein. The letter urged Iraqis to rebel against the “infidel,
criminal,murderous and cowardly occupier,” promised that those who collaborated
with the Americans would be punished, and predicted that “the day of liberation
and victory will come.” The letter was
dated April 28,Hussein’s sixty-sixth birthday. It confirmed many Iraqis’ worst
fears—that Hussein was still hiding in Iraq and waiting to stage a comeback.
Throughout the war, coalition
military planners and troops were fearful that Iraq would use chemical weapons
against them. These fears, however, were never realized. Although American
soldiers approaching Baghdad repeatedly found indicators of chemical weapons,
such as gas masks, protective suits, nerve gas antidotes, training manuals, and
barrels of suspicious chemicals, chemical weapons were never used by Iraqi
troops. As the war ended, the focus of the military turned to searching for
Iraq’s supposedly hidden cache of weapons of mass destruction. Despite
expectations that troops would quickly stumble upon illegal weapons left behind
by Iraqi forces,however, initial coalition efforts to search for such weapons proved
unsuccessful. A scientist who claimed to
have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program told an American military team
hunting illegal weapons that Iraq had destroyed chemical weapons and biological
warfare equipment a few days before the war began. The scientist led U.S.
troops to buried material used as the building block for a toxic agent used in
illegal chemical weapons. Hussein had supposedly focused on projects that would
be almost impossible for weapons inspectors to detect—for example, hiding
chemical ingredients that were not prohibited as weapons but that could be
quickly made into chemical weapons. Nevertheless, these experts concluded that
the only plausible use for the units was to produce germs for weapons, a finding
that bolstered U.S. prewar assertions that such mobile labs were being used by
the Iraqis to hide illicit biological and chemical weapons. As a result of the lack of success in finding
prohibited weapons, President Bush came under growing international pressure. An
editorial in the New
York Times, for example, said, “with every
passing day, American credibility is called into question. . . . The chief
justification for invading Iraq was to get rid of Baghdad’s stores of chemical and
biological agents and dismantle its effort to produce a nuclear bomb.”
The U.S. war in Iraq was the
first action taken under a new national security strategy created by President
Bush, called “preemption.” This policy calls for the United States to intervene
before a potential enemy can attack America. As President Bush explained in a
radio address in early April, his decision to attack Iraq was part of his plan
to “not sit and wait, leaving enemies free to plot another September 11—this time,
perhaps, with chemical, biological or nuclear terror.”
Indeed, critics of the war in
Iraq claim that the war will not make the United States or the world safer but
instead will increase the spread of nuclear weapons and inspire more terrorism.
The failure of the United States to secure nuclear waste sites in Iraq led to
looting of nuclear materials, and experts warn that, because of the war, this nuclear
material might end up more quickly in the hands of terrorists, creating an even
more dangerous terrorist threat. Also, the images of the U.S. invasion of an
Arab country, critics say, are bound to inspire more anti-American terrorist
attacks. This prediction appeared to come true quickly—in May 2003, suicide
bombers believed to be connected to al-Qaeda hit American targets in Saudi
Arabia.
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