U.S. - IRAQ RELATIONS AFTER THE GULF WAR

As the six-week Gulf War ended on February 28, 1991, the U.S.-led coalition had decimated the Iraqi army in the region, and had ousted Saddam Hussein's force from neighboring Kuwait with little loss of U.S. life. American political and military leaders had made the decision not to invade Iraq with the intention of forcing Hussein from power — a move that also left many of Hussein's elite Republican Guard units intact.

It was a decision that has sparked numerous debates within the military and diplomatic community and marked the beginning of a relationship that has plagued three U.S. presidents. Many have argued that U.S. military forces should have continued their operations in Iraq, invaded Baghdad and forced Saddam Hussein from power.

Even as he dedicated his presidential library, former President George Bush was still defending his decision not to continue the war.

"For those who now say ipso facto we should go in and kill [Saddam Hussein] -- then I would then ask the question, whose son, whose daughter would I ask to give their lives in perhaps a fruitless hunt in Baghdad, where we would have become an occupying power? I have no regrets," Mr. Bush told a crowd in 1998.

CONTAINMENT AND NO-FLY ZONES
Having left Hussein in power and not taken on the job of nation-building in 1991, U.S. policy towards Iraq focused instead, in the view of many experts, on containing the Iraqi leader's regime and crippling his ability to make war or produce chemical or nuclear weapons.

The containment policy was built on the large no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq that were put in place by U.S. and allied military planners after the Gulf War. The zones emerged during two uprisings just after the war within Iraq. Led mainly by ethnic Kurds in the north or Muslim Shia in the south, these groups occupied major cities in the region.

According to some U.S. diplomats and foreign journalists who worked in the region, the U.S. response to the uprising sealed the American policy on Iraq for nearly a decade.

"I think Saddam and the United States very often have a commonality which bonds them together and that is simply this: That without Saddam Hussein, Iraq would disintegrate into several countries and make more trouble for the rest of the Middle East," Hussein biographer and journalist Said Aburish told Frontline recently. "The American administration was afraid that Iraq will disintegrate. They had no plan for what might follow Saddam Hussein. And certainly President [George H. W.] Bush was explicit on that subject, saying he did not want to be mired in Iraqi internal affairs..."

Interviews at the time of the uprising seem to bear out Aburish's view. U.S. officials worried that further involvement in the region would only bring more chaos.

"I don't think that even if you overthrow Saddam Hussein we're not going to get a non-authoritarian government in Baghdad which can keep that country together," Lt. Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, said on the NewsHour in April of 1991. "[T]he second point I have difficulty with is the principle of involving ourselves this way any place that this sort of a disaster occurs. We could be in Tibet on this basis. How will we decide which countries we involve ourselves this way in and which ones we leave out?"

The United Nations, seeing the brutal repression of the rebellion as a threat to security throughout the region, adopted Resolution 688, calling for Iraq to end its military action against Kurds and Shias. The U.S., with the help of Britain and France, used the resolution to establish a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to limit Hussein's ability to launch attacks. A year later, the allies established a second area in southern Iraq.

Following one of numerous air strikes in the no-fly zones in 1998, President Clinton explained the U.S. goals of the air patrols.

"We enforce two no-fly zones in Iraq, one in the north, established in 1991, another in the south, established in 1992, which now stretches from the southern suburbs of Baghdad down to the Kuwaiti border. The no-fly zones have been and will remain an important part of our containment policy," President Clinton explained. "Because we effectively control the skies over much of Iraq, Saddam has been unable to use air power to repress his own people or to lash out again at his neighbors."

THE INSPECTIONS REGIME
While American and allied jets patrolled large swaths of Iraqi airspace, the second major branch of U.S. policy towards Iraq was playing out on the ground between United Nations weapons inspectors and Iraqi officials.

In the flurry of resolutions adopted by the U.N. Security Council in the months following the Gulf War, members created a U.N. Special Commission [UNSCOM] to oversee and verify the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Iraq had developed a sophisticated weapons program that grew to include nuclear, biological and chemical efforts.

UNSCOM, backed by U.S. intelligence efforts, worked to dismantle these programs. Until the special commission reported to the Security Council that all weapons and programs were destroyed, the U.N. would maintain a nearly total embargo of oil and other exports. The economic sanctions, which Iraq has blamed more than a million deaths on, have continued since the Kuwait invasion in August 1990.

After the passage of the Security Council resolutions (687 and 688), U.S. policy focused on the broadest enforcement of those U.N.-backed requirements that Iraq stop repressing its people and cease development of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq repeatedly claimed the UNSCOM inspectors were agents of the United States and that the inspection regime would never end.

Despite Iraqi claims, U.S. pressure in the U.N. helped continue the tight sanctions regime. Constant bickering and charges and counter-charges led to the collapse and ouster of the UNSCOM inspectors in late 1998.

The last U.N. inspector left Iraq in 1998, just ahead of a large-scale U.S. and British bombing campaign, dubbed Desert Fox (Link to page). In the four years since then, U.N. and U.S. authorities contend that Hussein has maintained and perhaps expanded at least part of his arsenal.

"It's more than interesting that in his public statement Saddam Hussein never claims to be disarmed," former UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler, and Australian, told a Senate committee in August 2002. "On the contrary he threatens a degree of destruction of his enemies which implies his possession of mighty weapons."

As rhetoric about possible U.S. military action mounted in 2002, the issue of weapons inspections and Hussein's desire to possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons continued to be the centerpiece of the American argument for a regime change.

MILITARY ACTION SINCE THE GULF WAR
Since the end of the Gulf War, military forces of the U.S., Britain, and to a lesser extent France have continued to see combat in Iraq. In hundreds of exchanges, allied aircraft have fired missiles and dropped bombs at Iraqi air defenses and radars deemed a threat to no-fly zone patrols.

On occasion, Iraq has claimed these attacks have destroyed civilian positions, including schools and hospitals. It has been impossible to confirm the facts behind these attacks or the damage inflicted on the Iraqi side.

Despite these nearly weekly exchanges, U.S. action has intensified on several occasions.

In 1993, the U.S. launched a massive tomahawk cruise missile strike against the Iraqi intelligence agency. The strike, retaliation for a foiled plot to kill former President Bush after he left office, leveled parts of Baghdad and was blamed for eight civilian deaths.

"This was a plot managed by the Iraqis to assassinate a former President of the United States," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright said on the NewsHour two days after the attack. "We saw that as an attack on the United States, and under international law, Article 51 specifically, a country is entitled to defend itself when there is an attack upon it."

Following the strike, military action remained limited to no-fly zone incidents until some three years later. In the midst of an election year in the U.S, Iraqi forces crossed a line of control in northern Iraq, headed towards a so-called safe haven for Kurdish refugees. Within a day, U.S. forces launched another large round of cruise missiles and air strikes aimed at punishing Iraqi forces in the area.

The last major military strike came following the ouster of United Nations weapons inspectors in late 1998. The attack, dubbed Operation Desert Fox, struck at suspected weapons facilities and other military targets throughout the country. The four days of air raids left scores dead and many installations inspectors had sought to examine flattened.

But with the exception of occasional no-fly zone incidents, both sides appeared to allow the current stalemate to persist as the Clinton administration came to an end.

AXES AND REGIME CHANGES
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, regional experts have said U.S. policy towards Iraq took a more hard-line stance.

Even during the campaign, then-Governor Bush said if it was discovered that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, he would "take him out."

"I'm just as frustrated as many Americans are that Saddam Hussein still lives," Gov. Bush told Jim Lehrer during the campaign. "I will tell you this: If we catch him developing weapons of mass destruction in any way, shape or form, I'll deal with that in a way that he won't like."

Once elected, President Bush's first military order was to strike air defense and other targets in Iraq. The air strikes, ordered in early February, 2001, targeted areas and sites outside the normal no-fly zones. At the time, Mr. Bush said the strikes were meant to send a warning to Saddam Hussein and to degrade his ability to threaten pilots patrolling the no-fly zones.

But it was following the September 11 attacks that U.S. policy took another official step. During his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush took aim at Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

"The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade," President Bush said. "This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like [Iraq, Iran and North Korea], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

With Iraq labeled a member of the "axis of evil", a growing number of officials with the administration and policy experts began calling for military intervention to oust the Saddam Hussein regime.

-- By Lee Banville, Online NewsHour