On March 20, 2003, roughly 170,000 coalition soldiers led by the United States crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq. Twenty-one days later, Baghdad had fallen. The Iraqi army, which on paper counted some 400,000 troops, disintegrated almost without a fight. American casualties during the combat phase were approximately 155 killed. As a purely military operation, the invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece. As a political project, it was a disaster that still reverberates.
The story of Iraq 2003 is, at its core, the story of a contradiction the United States has never quite resolved: its military capacity has no rival on the planet, but that same firepower is not enough to build nations. It is a lesson Washington should have learned by now, and yet seems condemned to repeat.
Shock and Awe: When the Machine Works
To understand what went wrong, you have to start with what went right, because it was impressive.
The Shock and Awe doctrine, developed by Harlan Ullman and James Wade in the nineties, proposed something different from classical attrition warfare. The idea was to overwhelm the enemy through such a crushing demonstration of power and speed that his will to resist would collapse before he could mount a coherent defence. In the first Gulf War of 1991, the coalition had assembled nearly 750,000 troops and conducted a five-week air campaign before launching the ground offensive. In 2003, with less than a quarter of those forces, the United States decided to do both at the same time.
The result was spectacular. The ground offensive and the air campaign kicked off simultaneously. Coalition forces breached the sand berms at the Kuwaiti border and pushed north while precision strikes destroyed command centres, military infrastructure and communications nodes. The Iraqi army, weakened by a decade of sanctions and equipped with obsolete gear, had no idea what was hitting it or from where. Entire units abandoned their positions without fighting. Conscripts with no sentimental attachment to Saddam's regime simply went home.
A prior disinformation operation had convinced the Iraqi command that the attack would come from Turkey or Jordan, which led Baghdad to deploy significant forces in the north and west, far from where the actual invasion took place. When the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines advanced from the south, they found fragmented resistance. The Republican Guard, Saddam's elite force, attempted a counterattack that was annihilated by coalition air power. On April 9, the famous statue of Saddam fell in Baghdad's Firdos Square, broadcast live to the world.
On May 1, Bush delivered his "Mission Accomplished" speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Major combat operations were over. The war, according to the White House, had been won.
It was, of course, barely the beginning.
The Plan That Never Existed
The fundamental problem with Iraq 2003 was not military but conceptual. The Bush administration had an excellent war plan and virtually no plan for what came after. This was not an accident: it was a deliberate choice.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, was an apostle of military transformation. He believed modern wars could be won with small, agile, technologically superior forces. And he was right, if you define "winning" as defeating the enemy army on the battlefield. Rumsfeld systematically dismissed warnings from the Joint Chiefs about the need for more troops in the occupation phase. General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, testified before Congress that "several hundred thousand" soldiers would be needed to stabilise Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, called that estimate "wildly off the mark." Shinseki was sidelined.
The administration's assumption was almost naive: that once Saddam was toppled, the Iraqi state would keep functioning normally, that the bureaucracy and security services would remain standing, that the population would greet the Americans as liberators, and that the transition to democracy would be quick and relatively painless. The body created to manage the post-war was called, revealingly, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. It was not a name that suggested a prolonged occupation.
Reality was different from day one. When Baghdad fell, the looting was immediate and massive. Hospitals, museums, ministries, electrical infrastructure—everything was looted while American soldiers, under orders not to intervene in civilian affairs, watched. Rumsfeld dismissed the chaos with his famous line: "Stuff happens." Meanwhile, Iraqis were discovering that their new "liberators" had no plan whatsoever to maintain order.
The Order That Changed Everything
On May 11, 2003, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad to replace Lieutenant General Jay Garner as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Garner, a pragmatic military man who was already negotiating with Iraqi generals to rebuild security forces, was removed after barely a month. Bremer, a diplomat with no Middle East experience, arrived with a radically different agenda.
In his first two weeks, Bremer issued two orders that transformed the occupation and, to a considerable extent, determined the future of Iraq.
Order No. 1, on May 16, launched the process of "de-Baathification": the purge of all Baath Party members from public administration. The Baath was Saddam's party, yes, but it was also the vehicle through which the Iraqi state functioned. Teachers, doctors, engineers, administrators—anyone who wanted to advance professionally had to join. De-Baathification drew no distinction between the regime's executioners and functionaries who had simply needed to join in order to work. In a single stroke, the Iraqi state lost much of its technical capacity.
Order No. 2, on May 23, was worse. Bremer formally dissolved the Iraqi army, security forces and intelligence services. Some 400,000 soldiers and officers found themselves, overnight, without employment, without income and without a future.
The official justification had an internal logic: the Iraqi army was an instrument of oppression, dominated by the Sunni minority, and keeping it would have sent an unacceptable signal to the Shia majority and the Kurds. Bremer and his adviser Walter Slocombe also argued that the army had effectively demobilised itself during the invasion: soldiers had abandoned their posts and were not coming back. In Pentagon jargon, it was a fait accompli.
The argument held a grain of truth. The army had indeed disbanded during the invasion. But there is a difference between conscripts walking away from their barracks and formally declaring that they no longer had a job or an institution. Before Bremer's order, an American colonel named Paul Hughes had been negotiating with Iraqi officers: 137,000 had registered their willingness to re-enlist. The original plan from the National Security Council, approved by Bush himself just ten days before the invasion, was to keep the Iraqi army and purge it selectively, as had been done with denazification in Germany. Bremer reversed that decision without any formal NSC deliberation. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, found out from the newspapers.
Who actually made the decision remains a matter of debate. Bush later said the policy had been to keep the army intact and that "it didn't happen." Bremer maintained he was acting under Washington's instructions. Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, denied giving the order but admitted he had handed over the drafts. Rumsfeld said he "rarely" spoke with Bremer. A 2023 Foreign Affairs article traced the origin of the draft to Abram Shulsky's Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, and concluded that there was no formal interagency process. When Bremer presented the plan by videoconference to the President and the National Security Council on May 22, nobody objected, and after a long silence Bush told him: "You're the guy on the ground." Bremer signed the order the next day.
The result was predictable. Hundreds of thousands of men trained in the use of weapons, familiar with military tactics, with access to arms depots that nobody had secured, and now with nothing to lose, were out on the street. Protests started immediately. On June 18, American soldiers killed two former Iraqi servicemen during a demonstration in Baghdad. The insurgency had its recruiting pool.
From Liberators to Occupiers
The transition was faster than anyone would have imagined. During the first weeks after the fall of Baghdad, many Iraqis did receive the Americans with relief, if not enthusiasm. Thirty years of dictatorship, three wars, a decade of sanctions that had devastated the middle class: there were genuine reasons to welcome whoever removed Saddam from power.
But the relief evaporated with a speed that the planners in Washington had not foreseen, mainly because they had not foreseen anything. The absence of basic services, the lack of electricity and clean water, the generalised looting that nobody stopped, the humiliation of checkpoints and night raids, the growing sense that the invaders had not the slightest idea what they were doing: all of it eroded the initial goodwill.
De-Baathification, moreover, was carried out in a way that maximised the damage. The task was largely delegated to Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, who used it as a tool for sectarian score-settling. Competent officials who had never tortured anyone lost their posts. The public administration disintegrated. The Shia, long oppressed under Saddam's Sunni regime, did not merely fill the vacated spaces; in many cases they sought revenge. The Sunnis, who had been the dominant elite, suddenly found themselves marginalised, dispossessed and demonised.
By the autumn of 2003, the insurgency was in full swing. It was not a unified movement but a constellation of actors with different motivations: former Baathist military men who wanted their positions back, Iraqi nationalists who rejected foreign occupation, jihadists who saw an opportunity to open a new front against the West, and sectarian militias of every kind. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian operating at the head of what would soon become Al Qaeda in Iraq, began carrying out car bomb attacks specifically designed to provoke a civil war between Sunnis and Shia.
Rumsfeld, who months earlier had dismissed the insurgents as "dead-enders," discovered that the war he had planned so brilliantly had turned into something entirely different: a counterinsurgency occupation for which he had neither the troops, nor the doctrine, nor the interest.
The Chain of Consequences
What followed is well known. The insurgency intensified throughout 2004 and 2005. The two battles of Fallujah became symbols of the conflict's brutality. The Abu Ghraib scandal, where American soldiers had tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, destroyed whatever moral pretension remained. Sectarian violence escalated to the brink of civil war, particularly after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra in February 2006, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. By that year, the civilian death toll in Iraq was catastrophic.
In January 2007, Bush announced the "surge": an additional deployment of more than 20,000 troops. Combined with General David Petraeus's strategy of allying with the Sunni tribes of the "Anbar Awakening" who had grown sick of the brutality of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the surge succeeded in reducing violence levels. It was probably the only genuinely successful strategic correction of the entire war. But it came four years late, cost thousands of additional lives, and its gains proved fragile.
When Obama withdrew the troops in December 2011, the Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki proceeded to do exactly what everyone feared: it marginalised the Sunnis, broke its promises to integrate the Awakening fighters, purged the army of competent officers to replace them with loyalists, and let the sectarian tensions that the surge had temporarily contained fester.
The result was ISIS.
The story of how the Islamic State came to control a third of Iraq in 2014, capturing Mosul, the country's second city, and declaring a caliphate, is inseparable from the decisions of May 2003. Former Baathist officers, trained in intelligence and military tactics, provided ISIS's organisational backbone. Haji Bakr, a former colonel in the Republican Guard, was the architect of the caliphate's intelligence structure. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future "caliph," had been radicalised in Camp Bucca, the American prison where jihadists and former Baathists coexisted for years, forging the alliances that would later prove lethal. Baghdadi's lieutenants included several former officers from Saddam's special forces and military intelligence. The organisation that planned the capture of Mosul was not the work of improvised fanatics but of military professionals who knew Iraq better than anyone.
What ISIS achieved between 2014 and 2017, including genocide against the Yazidis, systematic enslavement, the destruction of millennia-old heritage and a wave of attacks that reached Paris and Brussels, traces a direct line back to Order No. 2 of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Lessons from a War Nobody Wants to Learn
What does Iraq 2003 tell us about American power?
First, it confirms the obvious: that the military power of the United States is without comparison. The March-April 2003 campaign demonstrated that the Pentagon can project force at a scale and speed that no other state actor can match. This remains true today and is, ultimately, the guarantee of stability for the international order. Without American military power there is no global balance, no freedom of navigation on the seas, no credible deterrence against the revisionist ambitions of China, Russia or Iran. That is simply a fact.
But Iraq also demonstrates that military force, however crushing, is not enough to impose a lasting political order. The United States could destroy the Iraqi army in three weeks. It could not build a functional Iraqi state in eight years. It is not that the execution failed, though it failed in many ways: it is that the project itself was unrealisable. You cannot build a liberal democracy of Western inspiration in a tribal and sectarian society through foreign military occupation. This is not a progressive observation nor an anti-imperialist critique. It is pure political realism. Kissinger 101.
Second, Iraq shows the limits of technocratic arrogance. The Bush administration was populated by intelligent people who believed the world's history could be rebooted with enough political will and firepower. The neoconservatives, with their project to reshape the Middle East in the image of Western democracies, underestimated the density of history, the strength of religious and tribal identities, the complexity of societies that do not let themselves be redesigned on a Pentagon PowerPoint. They made, at bottom, a profoundly modern error: they believed social engineering was possible on a civilisational scale.
Third, the Iraq war was a strategic gift to Iran. Before 2003, Tehran was flanked by two enemies: Taliban Afghanistan to the east and Saddam's Iraq to the west. The United States eliminated both. Post-Saddam Iraq, governed by a Shia majority with deep connections to Iran, became a strategic asset for Tehran. The Iranian-backed Shia militias, the same groups that later fought ISIS, are today first-order political and military actors in Iraq. Iran won the Iraq war without firing a shot. If there is a clear strategic winner from the conflict, it is the Islamic Republic.
Fourth, Iraq should have inoculated the West against the temptation of transformative intervention. It did not: eight years later, NATO intervened in Libya with equally catastrophic results. The lesson resists being learned, perhaps because accepting it means acknowledging that there are problems without solutions, at least not solutions that can be imposed from outside. That is uncomfortable for a civilisation that believes in progress as a secular article of faith.
By Way of Conclusion
The invasion of Iraq cost the United States more than 4,400 dead, tens of thousands of wounded, and something like two trillion dollars by the most conservative estimates. It cost Iraq hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. It destabilised an entire region, strengthened Iran, created the conditions for the rise of ISIS, eroded Washington's international credibility and diverted resources from Afghanistan at the exact moment the Taliban was regrouping.
The weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion never existed.
All of that is true. And yet, the military capability that the United States deployed in March 2003 remains the fundamental fact of global geopolitics. The lesson of Iraq is not that American power is illusory. The lesson is subtler, and therefore harder to digest: that military power without political wisdom is a dangerous tool, capable of winning any war and losing any peace.
Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. The corollary Iraq teaches us is that when military means become decoupled from achievable political ends, the result is not victory but chaos. And chaos, once unleashed, has its own logic, its own inertia, and its own beneficiaries, who are rarely those who lit the fuse.