SUASIN, KRISHA MARIJOULE T.

BS FOREIGN AFFAIRS- IV

The US and Iraq war: ENDED

The war on United States and Iraq is very important to be contextualized, and in order to
contextualize it we need to go back to its history. Before the war of both states, in the 70s and
80s, Iraq had close ties with the western side of the world. However, when Iraq invaded its
neighbor in 1991, Kuwait a coalition of nation declared war on Iraq to restore Kuwait’s
Independence. A shift in the relations of US and Iraq happened, Saddam Hussein became the
villain followed by 13 years of economic sanctions. These sanctions resulted to major
consequences on Iraqi society. It greatly affected the people, resulting to death, illness, hunger.
Many academic scholars see the sanctions as a way of the United States to attain the consent of
the people, their suffering was their way of guaranteeing the acceptance of a new occupation.

About the decade later, The West believed that Iraq was creating Weapons of Mass
Destruction and Hussein’s connections with the militant and terrorist groups. There are also
economic reasons such as the abundance of oil in Iraq, the US needed to have dominance over
areas with this kind of resources.

The effects of the American invasion in 2003 had huge effect to the Iraqi people. Most of
the people suffered. Iraqi people were leaving the country resulting to destruction of their
society. There was also internal displacement since Iraq is a divided country. But the problem
was, Iraqi people did not gain sympathy over other states especially the American public. They
either don’t understand how big the problem was or they were simply misinformed because of
the script that America is telling the media. Bottomline is, what we know today, the creation of
WMDs and alliance with militant and terrorist groups was a false claim.

As the new president Barack Obama was elected in 2008, shortly after his inauguration,
he announced the drawdown from Iraq. This culminated the last troops leaving in December of
2011. However, the Iraqi government could not fill the power vacuum left behind by the US
military. In 2014, a new terrorist group called the ISIS began taking over the Iraqi cities as well
as Northern Iraq. This led to US military coming back to Iraq, but with a shift in their mission,
they were deployed in Iraq to train and support Iraqi security forces and Kurdish militias battling
ISIS. The battle for Mosul began in 2016 with the support of US artillery, Iraqi military slowly
retook their city and by July 2017, the city fell after a long siege.

On December 2017, Iraqi military declared the country “fully liberated” from terrorist
group, ISIS. Also, there were sectarian tensions, Iraq has become more stable since the defeat of
the ISIS.

Three years after the occupation of terrorist group and 13 years after complete liberation
from American military occupation, the old city of Mosul, is deserted, covered in millions of
tons of rubble strewn with thousands of explosive devices left behind by the ISIS. Millions of
Iraqis were displaced between the years 2014 to 2017, nearly 4 million have returned to their
homes already and starting to rebuild their broken society. Over 24 million square meters have
since been cleared, allowing stabilization activities to begin, and enabling families to return
home and resume their lives.

It was demoralizing when Iraq was disempowered, it affected the whole region and it
took them a very long time to recover. However, today, Iraq is slowly getting back and
rebuilding their home with the help of the United Nations and organizations involved.