Preparations for 2003 invasion of Iraq

rdf:langString Preparations for 2003 invasion of Iraq

rdf:langString The 2003 invasion of Iraq began on March 20. On March 18, US President George W. Bush had set a deadline for the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, to leave the country or face military action. By the time of the ultimatum, political and military preparations for the invasion were well advanced. Plans for securing Iraqi cities following the invasion, infrastructure reconstruction, and transitioning the country into a post-war government – plans to "win the peace" — were either nonexistent or woefully inadequate. The lack of a post-invasion security plan allowed widespread looting and the violent insurgency that immediately followed the invasion. The looting "caused far more damage to Iraq's infrastructure than the bombing campaign" and suggested to the insurgents that the US military was vulnerable. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction wrote, "There was insufficient systematic planning for human capital management in Iraq before and during the U.S.-directed stabilization and reconstruction operations." Former UK Minister of Defence Geoff Hoon commented on this issue in 2007 and said, "There was an enormous amount of post-war planning. It's one of the things that the newspapers have never troubled to look at. I accept, and I've said so publicly, that we perhaps did not anticipate quite the kinds of trouble that we would have. I think we thought that because the population of Iraq hated Saddam Hussein, they would simply come out on the streets and everything would be fine... I don't think we quite estimated the degree of control that Saddam's people had in Iraqi society... So the kind of things we were planning for, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps weren't quite the right things. But they were the right things in terms of the problems that we anticipated, which was the lack of food, water. We probably didn't quite appreciate, as I say, the ruthlessness of some of Saddam's [followers]."