Five years later, Iraq still in turmoil
By Monte Ashqar
Issue date: 3/14/08 Section: News
Originally published: 3/13/08 at 6:04 PM CSTLast update: 3/23/08 at 3:53 PM CST
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Five years ago, President George W. Bush ordered military action against Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein, Iraq's president at the time, from expanding an alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program.
As of now, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died.
Hans Blix, former U.N. weapons inspector tasked with investigating Iraq's unconventional weapons program, found that Iraq did not have unconventional weapons capabilities or programs to develop any.
He also told the British Independent newspaper on March 4, 2004, that the war in Iraq was illegal, and that there was no proof that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
In April, former CIA Director George Tenet published his book "At the Center of the Storm," in which he said the Bush administration was looking for any evidence, regardless of its plausibility, that would justify invading Iraq.
Today, Iraqis still die in bulk daily because of sectarian violence, al-Qaida's suicide bombings aimed at Shiite Muslims and U.S. soldiers, and coalition forces' military operations.
In 2006, the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, in coordination with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a study estimating that about 400,000 more Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion compared to deaths in the last three years under Hussein's rule.
The study attributed 50 percent of the deaths through May 2005 to coalition forces.
After that, Iraqi deaths caused by coalition forces dropped to 28 percent.
Sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims claimed a more substantial proportion of the deaths.
U.S. Armed Forces invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein's brutal regime within three weeks of the March 20 invasion.
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