Iraq Timeline War To Be Followed
If the timeline to war were to be followed, the Iraq War would now seem to be a war that was waiting for an excuse to happen. The Iraq Timeline War has a long history. The Iraq Timeline War goes through the decade of the 1990s with the United Nations Security Council passing sixteen resolutions demanding that Iraq dispose of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Following the end of the Gulf War, the UN required Iraq to declare all of its WMD and long-range missiles.
The UN also created the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), which, together with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was tasked to conduct inspections and supervise the destruction of dangerous weapons. This twin operation, where Iraq declared and the UN verified, punctuated the Iraq Timeline War and continued for eight years. This interlude in the Iraq Timeline War was characterized as a game of "hide and seek" by the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). This prelude to war was a period of frustration. Despite Saddam's shenanigans, significant progress toward disarmament was achieved by 1994, as UNSCOM supervised the destruction of large quantities of chemical weapons. Progress was made again in 1996, when UNSCOM again oversaw the destruction of biological weapons facilities and Iraq's significant nuclear infrastructure, while the IAEA moved all fissionable material out of the country. The Iraq Timeline War changed course in late 1998, when inspectors were withdrawn from the country. The U.S. Congress, dominated at the time by Republicans, passed the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA) urging President Clinton to "take appropriate action … to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations." The ILA asserted that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." What had previously remained unstated since 1991 thus became official U.S. policy. This was an ominous portent in the Iraq Timeline War. When Clinton signed the ILA on October 31, 1998, Hussein announced that he would cease to cooperate with UNSCOM. The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan tried to broker an agreement, but despite pledges to cooperate, Hussein continued to obstruct UNSCOM and IAEA activities in Iraq. On December 16, 1998, President Clinton announced the start of Operation Desert Fox. In the first U.S. military action on the Iraq Timeline War, U.S. and U.K. warplanes conducted air strikes on military and security targets. Iraq would continue to be defiant over the next three years. In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. asserted that it would no longer tolerate Iraqi intransigence. Within six months after invading Afghanistan, Washington began to prepare for military action by pulling out CIA operatives and special operations forces from Afghanistan and deploying them in Iraq to destabilize the regime. The stage was set in the Iraq Timeline War. |