Was Iraq War Justified?

In spring 2003 the United States led coalition launched the major offensive in order to oust the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The offensive successfully ousted Saddam after a few month air strikes followed by ground offensive and President Bush announced “Mission Accomplished” when the coalition forces captured Baghdad. The declaration of war against Iraq has sparked a worldwide controversy about the justification of the War. This paper will discuss whether the “Iraq War” and the “Ousting of Saddam” was justified or not.

Was Iraq War Justified?

Unlike the first Gulf War this war didn’t win that level of world wide support and approval. Most of the nations opposed the intelligence information on the bases of which the war was declared. Even many allies of the first Gulf War doubted the soundness of these grounds of declaring the war. That why Bush and his partners bypassed the United Nations as there was strong opposition among the Security Council members making it impossible for the U.

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S to get an approval from there. (Knudsen, 9) The error in this decision was a year later admitted by the Republican Rep.

Doug Bereuter as he said that “the attack was initiated without a broad and engaged international coalition. ” (Walton) Speaking the legitimacy of the war, the United States and her allies relied on the resolution 1441 of 8 November, 2002 and other earlier resolutions regarding the liberation of Kuwait like resolution 678 and resolution 687. But it is quite clear that none of these resolutions authorizes the use of force against Iraq and According to Thomas Franck “This version of the meaning and intent of these three resolutions is highly problematic” (Franck, 612).

He further states that neither resolution 678 nor resolution 687 helps the United States and her allies to make a convincing case that they acted with the law. (Franck, 613; Yoo, 566) Instead the resolution 1441 demanded an unconditional cooperation with the United Nations regarding WMD search and disarming. And according to the statement released by Hans Blix just a couple of weeks before the war broke that “Iraq had unconditionally and actively cooperated. ” (Knudsen, 11) These statements clarifies that the legitimacy of the US led war against Iraq is also questionable.

The strongest argument against launching an offensive to depose Saddam was that he has not done any thing wrong since the last Gulf War. He was abiding by all the conditions imposed on him after the War. Regarding the allegations that he has been hiding WMDs, they argued that the U. N. inspectors have search every inch of the Iraqi territory under Saddam’s jurisdiction and finally have declared him clean. The most powerful argument in favor of the war were on the basis of those intelligence reports that claim that the Iraqi dictator has not demolished all his weapons of mass destruction and they are hidden some where in the country.

The reports also claimed that Saddam has been violating the obligations imposed on him and is secretly increasing his weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal. These were the controversies at the beginning of the war. But when the U. S. led allied forces occupied Baghdad and the rest of the Iraqi territory they again searched nearly every inch of the country and again they failed to find any W. M. Ds. This was a severe blow for the Bush administration which relied heavily on this allegation.

When it became clear that there are no WMDs in Iraq, the Bush administration started a new explanation about going to the war that the primary reason was to free the Iraqi people from Saddam. The credibility of this explanation is so low that even Paul Wolfowitz US deputy defense secretary agreed that “Mr. Hussein’s misrule by itself was not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk. ” (Lindsay) To make the situation even worse the Iraqi resistance emerged and attracted the Muslim insurgents from every part of the globe. Very soon Iraq became a heaven for Islamic Fundamentalists across the globe and became a stronghold of Sunni insurgency.