République et démocratie

PABLO CORDERO

L1 SCIENCES POLITIQUES

US CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

Based on the course's notes and reading material as well as your own research and reflections: what is the most important contemporary US conflict and why?

Tensions between the United States and Iraq began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The Iran-Iraq war of the previous decade had left Baghdad in debt of $14 billion to the Kuwaiti emirate, which had supported it. In this context, Saddam Hussein accused the neighboring country of having carried out drilling in Iraqi territory and of having lowered the price of oil. When the Kuwaiti government refused to forgive him the debt, the Iraqi president decided to launch his offensive.

Hussein's military action was condemned by the international community. The United Nations Security Council retaliated by approving a full embargo on Iraq, but sanctions did not stop the attack. For this reason, the United States led a military coalition to evict Iraqi troops from the emirate. Operation Desert Storm began in January 1991 and marked the first US intervention abroad since the Cold War. The result was a withdrawal from Iraq a month later.

That conflict, the Gulf War, marked the relations of the United States with the Hussein regime. In the 1990s, the CIA began to suspect him of possessing chemical weapons. Baghdad's refusal to collaborate with the UN in the disarmament process fueled Washington's discontent, which launched Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. For three days, the United States and the United Kingdom bombed Iraqi infrastructure for the White House. could house chemical weapons. This aggression caused between 600 and 2,000 deaths and worsened the situation of Iraqi society.

The hostility of the United States against Iraq worsened with the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York. US President George W. Bush used them as a pretext to declare war on terrorism. Its purpose was to put an end to the terrorist organization Al Qaeda and the regimes that, according to the Pentagon, supported jihadist terrorism, for which reason it grouped Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil".

Having overthrown the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington took aim at Iraq. In September 2002, Bush expressed his concern to the UN General Assembly about the threat that Baghdad posed to global security. From there, the United States and the United Kingdom began to spread disinformation about the existence of weapons of mass destruction on Iraqi soil. The Americans urged the Security Council to approve a resolution that would promote the disarmament of Iraq, but the interest became an explicit commitment to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein.

Despite not having the support of the Security Council, the United States led an international coalition to invade Iraq on March 20, 2003. Bush's preventive war was backed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish President José Maria Aznar. The three leaders had met four days earlier in the Azores islands to issue a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to Hussein, demanding complete disarmament. Given the lack of response, the White House approved Operation Nuevo Dawn.

Iraq's military intervention lasted just over a month and defeated Iraqi forces. Saddam Hussein was overthrown in favor of the Coalition Provisional Authority and, months later, captured by the US military, until he was tried and executed. Washington tried to steer the country towards democracy, but the power vacuum unleashed a wave of violence between Sunnis and Shiites. The war in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, when the occupation ended, caused thousands of deaths, led to the birth of the Iraqi faction of Al Qaeda, considered the predecessor of Daesh, and left an economic, political, and social crisis, in addition to a civil war. The aggression by Washington and its allies was rejected by the majority of States, which considered it a violation of international law.

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