#2003-iraq-invasion

#2003-iraq-invasion

The American people love to win. If you go back and you look at Desert Storm, and obviously you can speak to this much better than I, I mean it was very successful. The amount of time they had troops on the ground for was days, not even weeks, and you look at Bush's ratings coming out of that and he had an 89% approval rating.

Both the CIA and MI6 had amassed troves of deep intelligence about the impending war and were issuing dire notices to their allies about the inevitability of an invasion by Putin. Those warnings were all but ignored in key European capitals. Why? In large part because US and British intelligence were considered untrustworthy after the extraordinary intelligence debacle in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A missile struck a helipad inside the US Embassy in Baghdad, two security officials told the Associated Press news agency. The projectile landed within the embassy's boundaries after the Green Zone, the heavily fortified district in central Baghdad that houses Iraqi government institutions and foreign embassies, added the security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak with the press.

A US military refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq on Thursday, in an incident US Central Command said involved another aircraft but was not the result of hostile or friendly fire. The United States has surged a large number of aircraft into the Middle East to take part in operations against Iran.

Within hours of the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran, US assets in Iraq's Kurdistan region came under retaliatory attacks from Tehran-backed groups, dragging the country into the conflict that has since expanded across the Middle East and beyond. Since then, US assets located in Iraq have come under multiple attacks from pro-Iran groups and Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC).

Trump said on Thursday that a US armada is heading towards the Gulf region with Iran being its focus. US officials said an aircraft carrier strike group and other assets are to arrive in the Middle East in the coming days. We're watching Iran. We have a big force going towards Iran, Trump said. And maybe we won't have to use it. We have a lot of ships going that direction.

On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, stood before a banner reading Mission Accomplished, and declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But the mission had not been accomplished. The war would continue for another eight years, cost nearly 4,500 American lives, and reshape the Middle East in ways no one in that administration anticipated or fully acknowledged.

The ground war began in Iraq last night as British and American marines stormed beaches on the Gulf coast in an assault on the south-eastern city of Basra, while explosions lit up Baghdad under a heavy bombardment by cruise missiles. The first British fatalities came shortly afterwards when a US helicopter crashed in Kuwait, killing all on board. Suzanne Goldenberg's front-page report from Baghdad revealed that only two hours after the decapitation effort, Saddam Hussein himself had made a defiant appearance on television.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE - Iran is experiencing its most consequential period of internal in years. Nationwide demonstrations driven by economic collapse, social grievance, and political frustration have been met with force, mass arrests, and near-total information control. The scale and coordination of the response suggest a regime that feels threatened but not unmoored, confident in its ability to absorb pressure while preventing fragmentation.