page_title: History of the United States (1991–2008)
section_title: Iraq War
hierarchical_section_title: History of the United States (1991–2008) / Conflicts / Iraq War
caption_attribution_description: English: A bar graph showing the complete US fatalities from Operation Iraqi Freedom by month, from beginning to end. Based on this Google Chart API graph, with further editing in Photoshop. The red months are pre-troop surge, the orange months are post-troop surge, and the blue months are under Obama. Although overall month-on-month figures have decreased, the total level of coalition forces has also reduced.
context_page_description: The history of the United States from 1991 to 2008 began after the fall of the Soviet Union which signaled the end of the Cold War and left the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The U.S. took a leading role in military involvement in the Middle East. The U.S. expelled an Iraqi invasion force from Kuwait, a Middle Eastern ally of the U.S., in the Persian Gulf War. On the domestic front, the Democrats won a return to the White House with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. In the 1994 midterm election, the Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Strife between Clinton and the Republicans in Congress initially resulted in a federal government shutdown following a budget crisis, but later they worked together to pass welfare reform, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and a balanced budget. Charges from the Lewinsky scandal led to the 1998 impeachment of Clinton by the House of Representatives but he was later acquitted by the Senate.
context_section_description: In his State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush called Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of evil". The Bush administration later began making a public case for an invasion of Iraq, accusing them of violating the 1991 UN-imposed ceasefire, supporting terrorism and being in possession of weapons of mass destruction (later, the latter of these accusations were proved to be false, and the first two are considered very dubious by most historians).
  Some important allies of the U.S., including India, Japan, Turkey, New Zealand, France, Germany, and Canada, did not believe that the evidence for the President's accusations was well-founded enough to justify a full-scale invasion, especially as military personnel were still needed in Afghanistan. The UN Security Council did not approve of the invasion, and the U.S. therefore provided most of the forces in the invasion of Iraq. With the support of a coalition whose major partners included the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Spain, and Italy, Iraq was invaded on March 20, 2003.
  After six weeks of combat between the coalition and the Iraqi army, the invading forces had secured control of many key regions; Hussein had fled his palace, his regime clearly over; on May 1, President Bush declared, under a sign reading "mission accomplished", that major ground operations were at an end. Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday were killed by U.S. forces; Saddam himself was captured in December 2003 and taken into custody. Nevertheless, fighting with the Iraqi insurgency continued and escalated through the 2004 U.S. national elections and beyond.
  With casualties increasing and the cost of the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq estimated at over $200 billion, the war has lost about one-third of its supporters in the U.S. since the end of major operations was announced. Contemporary polls suggested that international displeasure with the United States was at an all-time high, with a majority of people in Europe believing that the country was too powerful and acted mainly in self-interest, and a vast majority in predominantly Muslim nations believing that the United States was arrogant, belligerent, or hateful to Islam.
caption: A graph of U.S. troops killed in the Iraq War. The orange months are post-troop surge and the blue months are under the Obama administration. The graph does not include those killed after July 2010.
exif: {}