believed to be meeting with aides. A full-scale invasion from Kuwait followed. Approx-
imately 150,000 U.S. troops, along with 44,000 British personnel and a few thousand
soldiers from other countries, moved quickly into southern Iraq. The invasion slowed
for a few days, starting on March 24, because of desert sandstorms and then because
of fierce hit-and-run resistance from Iraqi volunteer units called fedayeen.U.S. units
reached the Baghdad airport on April 3 and then stormed into the city. By April 9,
the U.S. Army and marines had gained overall control of most of Baghdad, with the
fall of Hussein’s government symbolized by the toppling of a monumental statue of
the Iraqi leader in the city center. Widespread looting, which the U.S. military made
little effort to control, offered a hint of the chaos to come.
Hussein and his top aides disappeared. In the months after the invasion, coalition
forces captured most senior Iraqi officials, and U.S. forces captured Hussein in Decem-
ber as he hid in a hole in the ground at a farmhouse along the Tigris River north of
Baghdad. The new Iraqi government put him on trial for ordering the murders of
innocent civilians earlier in his rule following an assassination attempt against him. He
was hanged in late December 2006 after his conviction.
With the collapse of the Iraqi military, Pentagon officials on April 14, 2003
announced the end of most fighting in Iraq. U.S. warships based in the Persian Gulf
began returning to their bases, and the Pentagon sent home units that had done some
of the heaviest fighting, replacing them with fresh units held in reserve.
“Mission Accomplished”
One of the most controversial elements of the Iraq War was the extravaganza the Bush
White House staged to celebrate the coalition victory. On May 1, Bush flew in a Navy
jet to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincolnas it steamed toward San Diego harbor; he
stepped onto the ship’s deck wearing a pilot’s flight suit. With a large banner in the
background proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” Bush gave a triumphant speech,
announcing that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
Without a doubt, White House officials hoped to use footage from this event in
the president’s election campaign the following year. Instead, the president’s claim of
success proved to be premature and later came back to haunt him. In retrospect, May
1, 2003, marked the divide between two phases of the war in Iraq: the rapid over-
throw of the Hussein government and the years of chaos that would follow. To the
administration’s embarrassment, news organizations also used May 1 to gauge U.S.
casualties in the war. As of that date in 2003, 115 U.S. service personnel had died in
combat. Four years later, U.S. deaths in Iraq from all causes exceeded 3,300.
President Bush had drummed up strong domestic support for the war when he
launched it, but the descent of Iraq into chaos under U.S. stewardship and rising casu-
alty figures greatly undercut that support. In 2006 voters defeated Bush’s Republican
allies and put control of Congress in the hands of Democrats who vowed to end the
U.S. military occupation of Iraq (Postwar Iraq, p. 510).
Following is the text of a nationally televised speech by President George W. Bush,
on May 17, 2003, demanding that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his two sons
leave Iraq within forty-eight hours or face a major invasion of Iraq by the United
States and its allies.506 IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS