While the operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been building in Afghanistan (and Pakistan), Bush's thoughts had never been far away from the perceived dangers coming from Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein.  Indeed, one of the things that marked the Bush presidency from its earliest days was the great antipathy that the Bush White House had to Saddam Hussein, and its determination to remove Saddam from power.  Pushing this idea strongly was the formidable neoconservative (or "neocon") team of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld's Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.  But Bush himself was also largely in line with this point of view.

The neocons represented the old tradition of Democratic Idealism, but a hawkish Idealism pushed by all-out force rather than by the dovish Idealism promoted through diplomatic appeasement.  According to neo-con thinking, Saddam was a dictator, an evil dictator, and he needed to go.  With his disappearance the Iraqis would have a wonderful opportunity to come to Democracy on their own.  And this Iraqi Democracy would stand in stark contrast to the repressive Arab regimes that surrounded it.  Iraq would become a beacon of democracy offering hope to the rest of the Arab or Muslim world.  This fit well with Bush's concept of compassionate conservatism.  A strongly compassionate neoconservative stand on behalf of global democracy was the very thing that supposedly dignified America.  It had long been (at least since the days of Woodrow Wilson a century earlier) a key part of America's "compassion" with respect to the rest of mankind. And thus the title "compassionate neoconservative" was a name that these White House neo-cons intended to wear proudly.

With the events of 9/11, the neocon team jumped at what they saw was the opportunity to connect Saddam with the terrorist attack.  In accordance with the new Bush Doctrine, any country (except obviously Pakistan!) giving sanctuary or aiding in any way the terrorists of 9/11 the Bush White House in its War or Terror was bound to take down.  Obviously (obvious to Bush and the neocons, anyway) Saddam must have been guilty of at least such support ... placing Saddam into the category of "terrorist enemy."  The neocons felt that they finally had in this anti-terrorist logic all the justification they needed to go after Saddam.

However, CIA chief George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice were very hesitant about going after Saddam. To their understanding, the war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda had to take precedence over any attack on Iraq to remove Saddam; there was little evidence that Saddam was connected with the 9/11 events; and failing to be able to demonstrate such a connection, America would not likely get the support from its allies that it would need to conduct effectively an attack on Saddam in Iraq.  And there was always the question of what to do with Iraq if and when Saddam fell.

Cheney had quite conveniently forgotten about his 1994 "quagmire" comment concerning Iraq, an earlier insight resulting from his having served Bush Sr. as Secretary of Defense.  But Tenet, Powell and Rice still saw Iraq in that very same light.  To go crashing into Iraq to overthrow the Saddam regime and put in place there a "democracy" was guaranteed to throw America into a quicksand of chaos, which would prove immensely expensive to then try to bring some degree of order there, and for which America itself would ultimately derive no visible benefit.

But that kind of insight was lost to Bush and the neocons, who were determined to go anyway.

Thus in his State of the Union address in January of 2002 Bush drew Iraq into his list of America's enemies in their "War on Terror" by describing an "Axis of Evil" of North Korea, Iran and Iraq, constituting a growing threat to the world.  Then too, the question of Saddam's role in this War on Terror would frequently be brought up at press conferences.  Clearly the War on Terror had not only bin Laden and al-Qaeda in its gun sights, but also Saddam Hussein.

However, as time went on and it increasingly appeared that there was no way to connect Saddam with 9/11, a new approach to the Saddam question began to be looked at with greater interest by the Bush cabinet.  Saddam boasted a lot about his contempt for the UN's restrictions and sanctions concerning biological and chemical weapons that he was supposed to get rid of, and of nuclear development that was forbidden to Iraq.  Boasting was one of the ways that Saddam attempted to keep a tight lid on Iraqi politics and a firm grip over the various ethnic sub-communities that made up Iraq.  Such boasting however gave the neocons the "proof" they needed that Saddam was indeed developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), in violation of a number of U.N. resolutions.  Therefore, America now clearly had moral grounds for taking action against Saddam – or so they hoped.

But here too, to get the international community behind such a move, Bush would need some kind of direct testimony from Iraqis themselves concerning Saddam's criminal activities.  Besides the Saddam boasting, all that they had was the testimony of a group of Iraqi expatriates who called themselves the Iraqi National Congress (INC) – who had gathered around the leadership of Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi had a deep hatred for Saddam, in great part because of Saddam's horrible persecution of the Iraqi Shi'ites, (Chalabi was a Shi'ite).

As an expatriate mathematician (with a Ph.D. in mathematics) and businessman living in the West since 1956, Chalabi had cultivated politicians in Washington (including the neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz) who believed that he could be the very person to replace Saddam, should the dictator fall.  But Chalabi's personal background was troubling.  Some CIA reports indicated that he could not be exactly trusted at his word – and that he might even be a double agent working with the radically Shi'ite Iranian (Islamic Republic) government.  Powell's State Department did not trust him either, finding no support for him, or even knowledge of him, in Iraq – and also wondering what happened with all the money that had been handed to him to support the INC.

But Rumsfeld and Cheney paid more attention to Chalabi's claim to have knowledge of the development of WMDs going on in Saddam's Iraq than they did to the hesitations of the CIA and State.  Chalabi had given them exactly what the neocons wanted to hear.

Powell however was balking at the neo-con position, which he felt was moving faster than the rest of America's allies were ready to move. He was afraid of a developing "unilateralism" on this matter ("forget the rest of the world; we can do this ourselves if need be").  Powell would get much appreciated support for his position when British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington.  Blair made it clear that Britain would gladly support an anti-Saddam action – but only if it got U.N. approval for action.  That of course would require well-demonstrated violations by Saddam of the restrictions placed on him by the U.N.

And so on September 12, 2002 (almost exactly one year after the 9/11 event) Bush went before the United Nations to lay his case for the necessity of an invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam.  He listed WMDs as the danger that faced the world if it did not act with the U.S. in deposing this dictator.

But some of America's traditionally strongest allies, France, Germany, Canada and New Zealand had strong reservations about the matter.  They viewed the anti-Saddam move as a distraction from the real business at hand in Afghanistan. They worried about what would happen to Iraq if Saddam were suddenly removed from the political scene.  Then there was also the major principle that would be violated in invading another country without major compelling reasons.  Saddam was a nuisance.  But a threat to the world necessitating his and his government's elimination?  Where was the American case for that?  Where was the hard evidence that pointed to the need for the kind of action that the Americans were requesting?

Finally in November, the U.N. Security Council arrived at a compromise (Resolution 1441) which called for renewed inspections by a U.N. inspections team – and the threat of "serious consequences" if Saddam did not accept this decision.  But both Russia and France let Bush know that "serious consequences" was not to be automatically interpreted as the right of America to invade Iraq.  And so the U.N. inspectors were sent off to Iraq to search for WMDs.  It was not exactly what Bush wanted.  But it was a start.

Now it was time to get Congress's backing.  Bush put before Congress in October a request for a resolution authorizing the use of U.S. armed forces against Iraq.  At this point Tenet was brought before the Senate to testify about what the CIA had to say about the situation.  But he confessed that the CIA had no intelligence estimate (study or report) on Iraqi WMDs!  The Senators were astonished.  Here the White House was clearly trying to move the country toward some kind of military engagement against the Iraqi government – and the CIA had no information to offer on the subject?  Tenet confessed that the Agency was busy in Afghanistan and had not found the time to do a study on the subject!  Actually, Tenet knew that the CIA had no firm data to back up the White House's WMD claims and was trying to skirt the subject.  But the Senate insisted that he come up immediately (within two weeks) with a complete Iraqi estimate.

Meanwhile Rumsfeld's Pentagon intelligence service (the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA) came up with its own "smoking gun" evidence: proof that the African country Niger had sold yellow cake uranium to Saddam.  Saddam, according to the DIA, was indeed working on nuclear energy development in violation of all U.N. resolutions – with the clear intent of developing a nuclear bomb.  This and other documents had been sent on to the CIA and other intelligence services by the Italian intelligence service – but had been dismissed by the CIA as likely forgeries.  But then the DIA published its own intelligence assessment describing the yellow cake sales and also the discovery of some aluminum tubes designed to be used in centrifuges employed in enriching uranium. The CIA had been upstaged by Rumsfeld's DIA.

At this point Tenet did what no true intelligence officer should ever do, which is to come up with the "facts" that he knows others want to hear.  But that is exactly what he did.  Rumors of aluminum tubes that were part of nuclear development that had been spotted in Iraq and mobile truck units possibly carrying biological weapons were now certified as being more than rumors but indeed hard fact (which Tenet knew was not the case).  The sure and certain existence of WMDs in Iraq now become the official stand of Tenet.  He had fallen in line with the neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz.

And thus Congress on October 16th gave Bush the much-wanted authorization to go to war against Saddam.  It was just weeks before a Congressional election and few Congressman, not even the Democrats, were eager to appear to go on record as being opposed to a war against a known evil dictator.  The support was overwhelmingly in favor: 297 for (215 Republicans and 81 Democrats) and 133 against (6 Republicans, 126 Democrats and 1 Independent) in the House and 77 for (48 Republicans and 29 Democrats) and 23 against (only 1 Republican, 21 Democrats and 1 Independent) in the Senate.

However, the harder Bush tried to make a case, the harder some of America's allies, most importantly France, worked to head off the move that Bush was clearly intent on making.  The situation for America was not being helped any by reports from the U.N. inspectors in early 2003 that so far, their search had revealed no WMDs.  They had discovered some materials and problem areas in Iraqi reporting.  Saddam was not being cooperative.  But the inspectors themselves had nothing yet that pointed to actual WMD production or even possession.

By now heavy pressure was being exerted on Powell as Secretary of State not only to be brought into the Cabinet "circle of the willing," but to stake his unimpeachably high international reputation in going before the world community to explain the American case in a final effort to get our allies on board with us.  The event that finally got Powell on board was an inexcusably rude treatment of Powell by the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.  Powell was now ready to go.

On February 6, 2003, Powell went before the U.N. Security Council – complete with photos, drawings and illustrations of what U.S. intelligence had "confirmed" as pointing to WMDs.  He also tried to draw a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda claiming the existence of a training camp in Iraq under al-Qaeda operative Zarqawi.  The tragedy was that none of this information that had been passed on to Powell to present at the U.N. had been verified by normal intelligence gathering standards.  Almost all of it would soon prove itself to have been either totally false or simply hyped in order to achieve the desired effect.  But in any case, the presentation did not move Russia, China, France or Germany away from their strong skepticism, even growing opposition, about the American program.  A week later the U.N. inspectors' chief reported that the Iraqis were becoming more cooperative – and that there were serious problems with a number of Powell's assertions.

In fact outside of America, the support for America's attack on Iraq was quite weak.  On February 15 an internationally organized anti-war protest turned out somewhere between six to ten million people in approximately 800 cities around the world.  Even in Britain itself, where the Blair government was supportive of America, clearly the British people were not.  Tragically for Blair, the Iraqi war in fact would prove to be the political undoing of a British prime minister who up until then had one of the highest popularity ratings ever with his people.

Nonetheless, toward the end of February, America, with its allies Britain and Spain, presented the proposal for a new U.N. resolution certifying that Saddam had not cooperated fully under the terms of Resolution 1441.  Thus, as America saw things, it was time to kick into gear the "serious consequences" portion of 1441. Passage of this new resolution would have given some kind of support to American actions in Iraq.  But it became apparent that the proposal was supported only by its three sponsors plus Bulgaria.  France, Russia and Germany were strongly opposed.  Seeing that failure in a vote would be worse than no vote, the proposal was withdrawn.  These were not good signs for Bush.

Nonetheless it was increasingly clear as February turned into March that America was going to invade anyway.  But now the question arose: how and when – and with what goals – would the attack take place?

Rumsfeld was in favor simply of a swift attack on Iraq to destroy Saddam and his Ba'athist government and then a fast withdrawal from Iraq as we left matters in the hands of Chalabi and the INC.  Chalabi and the INC would undertake the "de-Ba'athification" of Iraq (similar to the de-Nazification of Germany at the end of World War Two), the putting into place of a provisional government led by the INC, the drafting of a constitution, the holding of elections – and voilà, Iraqi democracy!

Rumsfeld (who was aware of how strapped we were for men because of the ongoing action in Afghanistan) assured the Cabinet that this all could be accomplished with a relatively small troop size of 70 to 80 thousand American and British troops.  But his own officers were skeptical of these numbers, informing the Senate at hearings being held at the same time as the Cabinet discussions that we would probably need at least 200 thousand troops to do the job properly.

Also Powell and Tenet were convinced that Chalabi was not the answer to the Iraqi problem that would emerge after the defeat of Saddam.  But they really had no alternative suggestions.  They probably were beginning to realize that with Saddam no longer in charge, things would get very messy, very quickly.  A "quagmire" as Cheney had once said.

Turkey presented an unexpected problem.  Rumsfeld had intended to hit Saddam and his army from both the north and the south of Iraq simultaneously.  The plan was that the southern attack would come up from allied Arab states along the Persian Gulf (principally Kuwait).  The accompanying assumption was that the northern attack would come through the territory of our NATO ally Turkey. But Turkey would not give its permission.  Turkey was afraid (quite correctly, as it turned out) that toppling the Saddam government would set off Kurdish expectations for the formation finally (after dreaming of this since after World War One in 1919) of a Kurdish nation-state.  That presented a major problem for Turkey because the southeastern part of Turkey was inhabited by Kurds who themselves dreamed of belonging not to Turkey but to a Kurdish nation-state. Thus Turkey was in no ways going to cooperate – but in fact was greatly upset by America's actions which were going to create huge problems for Turkey.¹  So Rumsfeld realized that he was not going to be able to engage the Iraqis on both fronts.  However he did anticipate cooperation from the Kurdish Peshmerga (Army) in the north of Iraq.  And the Turks did give permission at least to overfly the country to bring in a couple of thousand U.S. airborne troops, far short of the 15,000 that Rumsfeld had originally planned for.

On March 18th Bush gave Saddam forty-eight hours to get himself and his two sons out of Iraq.  When two days later that had not occurred, "shock and awe" as Rumsfeld would come to term it, began.  Massive bombing of Baghdad took place, creating a spectacular picture of the capital city lighting up the night sky with massive flames and bomb bursts – thus "shock and awe."

In very quick order, three weeks, the Iraqi army was destroyed.  By early April the US-led coalition, which had moved steadily north from the Persian Gulf against a retreating Iraqi army, was at the outskirts of Baghdad.  The Iraqi army was then ordered by America to surrender – or Baghdad would suffer an even worse fate than what it had already experienced thus far.  Saddam, of course, had vanished and thus the city and country found itself without a leader.  Thus on April 9th, the Coalition forces, principally American and British with Australia and Poland offering smaller support,² entered the capital city defended only here and there by small groups of resistance fighters.  Baghdad had fallen.

On May 1st (2003) Bush flew to San Diego to the U.S. carrier Abraham Lincoln to deliver a televised speech, celebrating the success of the mission – while behind him hung a huge banner with the words "Mission Accomplished" written on it. Those were not precisely Bush's words, and he reminded the listeners of the work ahead of them.  Yet certainly he conveyed the idea that some kind of thrilling political achievement had just taken place.  But actually, from this point on, things would get worse, monumentally worse – due to mistakes made by the Americans themselves.

¹This would unfortunately mark the beginning of Turkey's pulling away from its very strong support of America as a long-standing NATO ally – and its new journey into Islamic traditionalism, stepping Turkey away from its former quest for modernization on the Western model.  That would prove to be an additional huge political loss of American influence in the Middle East caused by this enormous American blunder in Iraq.

²They would be joined by small contributions (usually less than 100) of personnel from 36 other countries – merely tokens of political support.

At first the Iraqis were ecstatic.  There were celebrations in the streets, which turned themselves into attacks on visible signs of the Saddam regime.  But these acts of anti-government vandalism began to turn themselves into simply random vandalism.  It was clear that no one was in charge of policing the city.  American Military Police (MPs) would have been greatly helpful.  But Rumsfeld had made no plans whatsoever for policing the streets of Iraq.

Soon sectarian violence set in as Shi'ites took out their long-building hatred of the Sunnis for the oppression they had suffered at the hands of the Sunnis and their Ba'athist government.  And of course the Sunnis, frightened at the thought of the revenge that the huge Shi'ite population might take against them, fought back. Neighborhoods turned into battlefields.

This caught an uncomprehending Rumsfeld and the U.S. military greatly unprepared.  The State Department had offered its services.  But Rumsfeld did not want competition from State.  His own idea was to bring Chalabi into Baghdad, expecting to set him up in authority with great celebration.  But Chalabi was unknown to the Iraqis and meant nothing to them.  Both he and the INC proved to be worthless in terms of how Rumsfeld had anticipated things would go politically. Chalabi and General Garner, who had been sent by Rumsfeld to supervise humanitarian relief, did not get along, Chalabi complaining loudly to the Iraqi press that Garner was too friendly to the Ba'athists.

Meanwhile Baghdad continued to burn – with no firemen, no police, no very visible authority in command of the city ... or the country.

Order No. 1. Almost immediately a couple of political blunders – huge blunders – occurred.  In early May, a new U.S. Administrator, Paul ("Jerry") Bremer, was brought in to try to deal with this disastrous situation.  He was another Rumsfeld appointee, though it became quickly apparent that he intended to report to no one but himself.  He was empowered to issue decrees as he saw the need, the first one in mid-May announcing the de Ba'athification of the country.

He was warned by the former Administrator Garner not to do this.  Most every civil servant, university professor, school teacher, doctor, surgeon, civil engineer, etc. was a Ba'athist – because membership in the Ba'athist Party had been an absolute prerequisite to getting any kind of professional or even semi-professional job in Iraq.  But Bremer was adamant that his Order No. 1 would stand exactly as he intended it.  All Ba'athists were to be removed from their jobs, whatever that might be.  Who then with any leadership experience among the Iraqis was going to help America get Iraq back up and running again?

Order No. 2. Then a week later, a yet even greater blunder occurred when Bremer issued Order No 2, declaring that the Iraqi Army was to be disbanded.  With this, he unemployed several hundred thousand Iraqis with guns.  U.S. army officers complained that they had been counting on the Iraqi officers to help them keep some semblance of order in Iraq and needed their support.  The Iraqi soldiers were furious, demanding back pay for their services.  But again, Bremer would not back down.  With this he created a huge unemployed sector of the population – greatly frustrated individuals who possessed considerable knowledge about military tactics and the use of guns.  These were people ordinarily you would have wanted on your side – not bitter and ready to oppose you by whatever means.

What was the man thinking?³

Within a few days of the second order, the first attack on the American forces (and British troops in the South around Basra) occurred – the beginning of a horrible nightmare of surprise attacks of one kind or another on troops and civilian employees brought to Iraq to get the country up and running again.  Love of their liberators had turned fairly quickly into a seething hatred.

Meanwhile troubles were brewing within the upper ranks of the American leadership.  None of these vital decisions by Bremer were run by either Powell or Rice – though certainly they should have been.  They were not even made with any consultation with the American military  command in Iraq.  As a result, General Franks and all of the top American generals chose to "retire," leaving military command in the hands of an inexperienced one star general (who was quickly promoted to three-star rank!) Ricardo Sanchez.

Another mistake was then made, though this time not by Bremer.   Bremer wanted to take out the young Shi'ite firebrand mullah, Muqatada al-Sadr, who was directing a growing band of militants, drawn heavily from the slums of Baghdad, whose objective was to hit American or British troops.  But Rumsfeld (and Rice) told Bremer to back off, apparently fearing that this might alienate the Shi'ites.

American strategy in Iraq had thus switched from "tough" to "nice."  But "nice" was not working with the likes of al-Sadr.  Indeed, al-Sadr did not refer to these American and British troops as "liberators" but rather as "occupiers."  There was no gratitude in the militant ranks of the Shi'ites for the toppling of their cruel persecutor Saddam.  Their sole thought was to take advantage of the chaotic situation and get themselves in power as soon as possible.  The Americans and British were now simply in their way.  They wanted control – not "civil rights."

Even more problematic, in no way were they going to direct the majority Shi'ites to cooperate with the American and British effort to bring "democracy" to Iraq – even if that were to prove to be a Shi'ite majority (which indeed it would).  To al-Sadr and his supporters, America was simply the Great Satan come to Iraq – viewed in exactly the same way as their Shi'ite colleagues next door in Iran viewed America.  To al-Sadr, what Iraq now anticipated was not the blessing of democracy but the divine blessings that would come the Shi'ite's way in doing very serious moral-spiritual damage to the Great Satan America.

How Rumsfeld could effectively deal with such anti-American ideological dedication would be a huge mystery to American troops in Iraq – not to mention White House decision-makers back in Washington.

At the same time, the Sunnis – concentrated in the northwest of the country – were furious at the Americans for having turned the Sunnis out of power in favor of the huge population of greatly-hated Shi'ites.  The Sunnis were well-aware that American efforts to "democratize" Iraq would lock the Sunnis in a perpetual minority status.  Thus the Sunnis hated the Americans as deeply as did al-Sadr's Shi'ites.

America had marched itself into a lose-lose situation.

Then there were the Kurds in the northeast, happy with the Americans for having given them the opportunity to break away from Arab Iraq – although that was not part of the intentions of the Americans.  Indeed, such Kurdish independence sentiment would only serve to further undermine America's relationship with its old ally Turkey.

What a confusing mess America had just set loose in the heart of the Middle East! Bush and the neocons never saw that coming … well possibly with the exception of Cheney, who was well-aware of the potential "quagmire" awaiting Americans in Iraq.  But political opportunism in the Bush, Jr., White House had blinded him – or simply given him political amnesia – so as to cause him to ignore the obvious problems that awaited Americans in a post-Saddam Iraq.

Meanwhile the search for the famed WMDs was not going well at all.  As time passed the frantic search for the objects that had "justified" the American invasion of Iraq was yielding no results – not even the hint of WMDs.  But Tenet and Powell had staked their reputations on the intelligence that claimed that these existed (much of it fed by Chalabi, who was in a hurry to get Americans involved in toppling the hated Ba'athist regime).

Then in July 2003 an article appeared in The New York Times by a retired U.S. diplomat, Joseph Wilson, stating that the "yellow cake" nuclear material that Powell had made such a big deal of to the U.N. Security Council in fact never existed.  How did he know?  A week later The Washington Post came out with the story that it was the diplomat's wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, who had passed on the information to her husband.  This raised another question.  Who had given the Washington Post the information "outing" her as a CIA agent and thus effectively ending her career?  The whole thing turned into a massive spy scandal – not to mention huge embarrassment to the Bush Administration.

But this was just one part of the case for the invasion that was rapidly collapsing. Other intel leaks begin to appear, embarrassing the White House further.  Finally, to deflect the heat, Tenet was asked to resign as CIA chief.  He would be assigned the blame for the WMD fiasco!

By the summer of 2003, Iraq seemed to be back again at full-time war. The Jordanian embassy and the U.N. and Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad were blown up and insurgents were attacking U.S. troops and U.S. civilian workers everywhere.  Further, the American troops were prepared only to fight uniformed Iraqi troops.  Now, as in Vietnam, the insurgents (both Sunni and Shi'ite) who were attacking them were indistinguishable from the civilians the American troops were supposed to be protecting.  And Rumsfeld's plans to begin the reduction of the American troops presence in Iraq were now on hold.  But what to do at this point was not in the Pentagon's planning book.

However, finally in December, Saddam was found hiding in a hole in the ground at a farm near his hometown of Tikrit.  It was hoped that his capture would appease the Shi'ite insurgents and break the spirit of the Sunni insurgents.  Neither thing resulted.

³In December of 2004, an incredibly ill-informed President Bush presented Bremer America's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, stating: "For fourteen months Jerry Bremer worked day and night in difficult and dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to help its people rebuild and to establish a political process that would lead to justice and liberty."  However, at this point Iraq was hardly "stabilized" nor experiencing justice and liberty – due mostly to Bremer's massive political ineptitude.  Bremer, however blamed the very obvious Iraqi catastrophe on the inadequate American military support he was expected to work with.  Working with the Iraqis themselves was way beyond Bremer's understanding or abilities.

Tragically, the following year things only got worse in Iraq.  Sweeps through villages in search of insurgents brought huge outcries from the local population.  But America couldn't fight back without being able to identify the enemy.  America was heavily dependent on the local people to identify the insurgents.  But such assistance from the Iraqis was just not forthcoming.

Frustrated by a war without identifiable enemies, Rumsfeld ordered the ghastly Saddam prison Abu Ghraib to be used to squeeze any information possible out of captured insurgents.  But that idea would soon turn into another huge American embarrassment – when extremely gross pictures of the methods used to break Iraqi prisoners were leaked to the American press that spring.  And by the summer pictures of these acts were everywhere.

Also by that time al-Sadr (who was now being financed heavily by the Islamic Republic of Iran) was attacking Western troops with a "Mahdi Army" of several thousand insurgents.  Likewise, huge areas of Sunni Arab Iraq were under the control of local insurgents.  By this time, even Baghdad was a very unsafe city. Only the Kurdish north was relatively calm.

The White House was desperate for some good news.  Besides, 2004 was a presidential election year and the single biggest, even overpowering, issue in the electoral campaign was definitely Iraq.

A bit of good news finally came out of Iraq at the end of June when Bremer was able to announce the formation of a provisional government and an interim constitution.  Also General Casey had replaced Sanchez – and although Casey had never led American troops in combat, he would prove to be an effective fighting general against the insurgency.

Meanwhile Rumsfeld had ordered a shift in the American military strategy – to step American troops back from a forward strategy and to return them to base (the "small footprint" strategy).  American troops would now serve merely as something of an anchor to – and instructors of – Iraqi troops, who were to take over the duties of policing Iraq as soon as possible.  This was also in line with the idea that American troops would soon be departing Iraq – something Rumsfeld had wanted from the very beginning of the invasion.

The 2004 American presidential campaign not only focused heavily on the Iraq issue – but also on the issue of the integrity of the candidates, Bush and the Democratic Party candidate, John Kerry.  It got very personal.

A growing storm over John Kerry's military record was brewing by the end of the summer.  Kerry had served for four months in Vietnam in the late 1960s as the commander of a Swift boat, a shallow draft boat that patrolled the rivers of Vietnam.  Kerry received a number of medals for wounds and for actions under fire – which in the 2004 campaign a number of Swift boat veterans stepped forward to challenge as to their true worthiness.  Certainly also part of the irritation with Kerry by these veterans was the testimony that he made before the U.S. Senate in 1971 about war crimes committed by fellow American soldiers in Vietnam – which first brought the 27-year-old Kerry to national attention.  The "swift boaters" claimed that Kerry had not been telling the truth about the circumstances by which he had received his medals – and thus was unfit to command, especially as President.  But this claim was strongly contested by some of Kerry's own men who had served directly under him, claiming that Kerry's military record and awards were truly authentic.  Nonetheless, the scandal had a tremendous impact – and sank Kerry's popularity considerably.

Then in September, less than two months before the election, Dan Rather of CBS's 60 Minutes program came out with documents which pointed to Bush's own very questionable military performance back in the early 1970s as a member of the Air National Guard.  But it was soon revealed that these documents had not been authenticated by CBS – and were in fact written in a type script which did not come out until the development of the personal computer 10 years later.  CBS was humiliated and apologetic.  Interestingly, CBS had planned to come out with a program at about that same time very critical of the Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, but had substituted the Rather report instead.  The flack over the Rather report subsequently caused CBS to postpone the program until after the elections.  Had it gone forward, it might have done some serious damage to the Bush re-election campaign.

The election resulted in a 286 electoral vote (a 50.7 popular vote) for Bush and a 251 electoral vote (a 48.3% popular vote) for Kerry.  Despite the growing unpopularity of the War in Iraq, Bush was returned for another four years to the presidency.  Also in the election, the Republicans in the House actually increased their majority by 3 seats, 232 to 201 and increased their majority in the Senate by 4 seats, 55 to 45.