The United States launched air strikes on Iraq on March 19, 2003, and ground strikes on March 20. At the time, two-thirds of Americans supported the invasion. But 20 years after the Iraq war, a recent poll found that 61 percent of Americans now think the invasion of Iraq was a wrong decision by the United States. The survey was conducted by the online media Axios and the survey firm Ipsos.
However, 26 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans still think the decision to invade Iraq was correct. This survey was conducted on 18 Americans over 18 last week. It also shows that 67 percent of the participants in the survey think that this war has not made the United States safer in any way.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans want the United States to remain a global leader, according to the poll. Fifty-four percent of Americans believe that Washington's overall focus on national defense and homeland security over the past two decades has made the United States safer.
The US-led military alliance NATO invaded the country alleging that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Much of the initial support for the war was based on such false claims by the administration of then-US President George W. Bush.
According to an organization called the Iraq Body Count Project, 210,000 civilians were killed in Iraq during that invasion and the subsequent US occupation. Although the invasion was carried out in 2003 with the promise of free and democratic Iraqis, today's Iraq is far from that reality.
As a result of the invasion, Iraq fell into extreme instability. The country has become a breeding ground for terrorism. After the partial withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011, most of northern Iraq fell under the control of the Islamic State (IS) militant group.
There are currently about 2500 US troops in Iraq. Although three years ago they were asked to leave Iraq by the country's government. According to 2019 data from the US Defense Headquarters Pentagon, 4 thousand 487 American soldiers were killed in the country during the entire war in Iraq.
However, 44 percent of those polled were undecided about who was right about the war—those who have supported or opposed the Iraq war since its inception, or who have changed their positions.
Timeline: U.S. forces took Baghdad in early April. Bush's now-infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech came on May 1, 2003, just five weeks into the war.
- U.S. forces then spent eight years battling a determined insurgency. An estimated 200,000 Iraqis were killed along with nearly 5,000 U.S. troops. The war cost the U.S. an estimated $2 trillion.
- By 2005, American public opinion had generally turned against the war, according to Pew, though most Republicans continued to support it. Around the world, and in particular, among European allies, attitudes toward the U.S. turned sharply negative in the years after the invasion.
- Barack Obama made his opposition to the Iraq War a central tenet of his 2008 presidential campaign and promised to pull out within 16 months. Obama did withdraw the remaining U.S. forces in 2011 but was forced to send troops back three years later after ISIS conquered huge regions of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
- Donald Trump criticized the war repeatedly during his 2016 campaign, falsely claiming he'd opposed it from the beginning and challenging rivals like Jeb Bush and later Hillary Clinton for supporting it.
The legacy of the war had significant effects on the foreign policies of both administrations.
- When Obama was considering a military response to the Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons in Syria, for example, "you felt the ghost of Iraq that whole week," Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's top foreign policy advisers, said this week on the "Pod Save the World" podcast.
- Both presidents were generally more reluctant to put American "boots on the ground" in conflict zones than their immediate predecessors, Bush and Bill Clinton.
- That more cautious approach to the use of military force overseas appeared to be mirrored in U.S. public opinion. However, a 2022 survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that most Americans would support military intervention in certain scenarios, such as if Russia invaded a NATO ally.
State of play: Just 31% of Americans think the Iraq War made America safer, while 36% think the U.S. was right to invade, according to the Axios/Ipsos poll published this week.
- There is a clear partisan divide, however, with 58% of Republicans believing the U.S. was right to invade compared to 26% of Democrats.
- Younger Americans, in particular, do not think the U.S. was right to invade Iraq, though majorities in every age group hold that view.
Blair's cleanup
According to RT, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently defended the Iraq war. He claimed that the US-led invasion of Iraq was far more logical than Russia's ongoing military operations in Ukraine.
Blair's cleanup is not new. He has made such justifications for war before. Everything was later proven wrong.
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