Iraq: One Year After

Thomas R. Pickering and James R. Schlesinger and Eric P. Schwartz
Council on Foreign Relations
March 2004

Executive Summary

On March 20, 2003, the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, designed to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. By mid-April, major fighting was essentially over, and on May 1, the United States declared an end to major combat operations.

With that declaration, the United States faced the daunting challenge of ensuring stability in the post-conflict period and encouraging a peaceful political transition to a new and democratic Iraqi government.

Even before the onset of the war, public discussion in the United States about Iraq had begun to shift away from the question of whether to go to war to the challenge of the post-conflict transition. As the prospect of war became more imminent through the fall of 2002, a wide range of analysts, within and outside government, argued that the postconflict requirements would be far more demanding than the task of removing the regime of Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1990s, U.S. involvement in post-conflict reconstruction efforts—from Haiti to the Balkans to East Timor—had revealed that addressing public security, interim governance, economic development, and a political transition process was an enormously complex challenge requiring resources that severely stretched the capabilities of the United States and the international community. And the challenges for U.S. policy in postwar Iraq, given the geopolitical stakes, the threat of ethnic conflict and armed resistance, and the political complexities of administering a legal occupation, were far more formidable than those that confronted U.S. officials in previous cases.

Full text (PDF, 53 pages, 258.3 KB)

 

Justifications and Ramifications of the War | The War and the Wider World | A Violent Month | Events of the Past Year | Government Documents | Maps