That is the future we choose. Free nations have a duty to defend our people by
uniting against the violent. And tonight, as we have done before, America and our
allies accept that responsibility.
Good night, and may God continue to bless America.
SOURCE: Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 39, no. 12 (March 24, 2003): 338–341. National
Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?
dbname=2003_presidential_documents&docid=pd24mr03_txt-9.Postwar Iraq
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
In its limited planning for postwar Iraq, the Bush administration had worked from
the assumption that Iraq would be pacified quickly after Saddam Hussein’s ouster, that
a new government installed under U.S. tutelage would gain broad public support, and
that U.S. soldiers and marines could be withdrawn rapidly. All of these and other sim-
ilarly optimistic assumptions proved to be false. Rather than stabilizing, Iraq rapidly
descended into increasingly worse chaos. The Bush administration found itself franti-
cally attempting to develop one plan after another to deal with changing circumstances.
Each plan succumbed, however, to stubborn realities on the ground, the foremost
being violence driven by Iraqis opposed to the continued U.S. presence and those
determined to assert their sectarian interests above the interests of others. By 2006 Iraq
had a democratically elected government that survived only with U.S. military pro-
tection and was itself in thrall to the sectarian interests of the majority Shiite popula-
tion (The Iraq War, p. 504).
That the situation in Iraq would calm shortly after the overthrow of Hussein
became the first of the Bush administration’s assumptions to prove false. Instead, vio-
lence grew, first in the form of sporadic attacks on occupation forces, then in bomb-
ings of high-profile targets, and then in a generalized pattern of shootings, roadside
bombings, suicide bombings, assassinations, and other forms of violence intended to
drive out the occupiers and frighten Iraqis.
In August 2003 a series of major bombings set the pattern for later years. In the
first of these attacks, on August 7, a truck bomb exploded outside the Jordanian
embassy in Baghdad, killing seventeen Iraqis and wounding more than forty others.
Twelve days later, a cement mixer filled with almost a ton of explosives blew up out-
side UN headquarters in Baghdad. Twenty-three people were killed, including nine-
teen UN staffers, the most prominent being Sergio Vieira de Mello, the chief UN rep-
resentative in Iraq who had been a key intermediary between U.S. occupation
510 IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS