The war marked a new departure in American foreign policy. The United States had frequently intervened unilaterally in the affairs of Latin American countries. But outside the Western Hemisphere it had previously been reluctant to use force except as part of an international coalition And while the United States had exerted enormous influence in the Middle East since World War II, never before had it occupied a nation in the center of the world’s most volatile region.
Rarely in its history had the United States found itself so isolated from world public opinion. Initially, the war in Iraq proved to be popular in the United States. After all, unlike earlier wars, this one brought no calls for public sacrifice from the administration. There were no tax increases, and no reintroduction of the draft to augment the hard-pressed all-volunteer army. Many Americans believed the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11 and had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The realization that in fact Hussein had no such weapons discredited the administration’s rationale for the war. Subsequent investigations revealed that intelligence reports at variance with administration claims had been sidetracked or ignored. With the weapons argument discredited, the Bush administration increasingly defended the war as an effort to bring freedom to the people of Iraq. This argument resonated with deeply rooted American values. But by early 2007, polls showed that a large majority of Americans considered the invasion of Iraq a mistake, and the war a lost cause.
President Bush standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Map 10, 2001, announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq. A banner proclaims, “Mission Accomplished.” Unfortunately, the war was not in fact over.
Much of the outside world now viewed the United States as a superpower unwilling to abide by the rules of international law. They believed that a nation whose Declaration of Independence had proclaimed its signers’ “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” had become indifferent or hostile to the views of others. As early as 2003, a survey of global opinion had found that even in western Europe, large numbers of people viewed the United States as a threat to world peace. The fact that Iraq possessed the world’s second-largest reserves of oil reinforced suspicions that American motives had less to do with freedom than self-interest.
The Iraq War severely strained the United Nations and the Western alliance created in the aftermath of World War II. But whatever the outcome, for the third time in less than a century, the United States had embarked on a crusade to create a new world order.