Page 160 - NS-2 Textbook

THE 1990, AND BEYOND 153

more remote mountainous regions of the country, lookillg Iraqi Kurds fighting there. By 9 April these forces had
for remnants of al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and officials of his succeeded in capturing Baghdad, and on 1 May, Presi-
organization, but with little success. dent Bush declared that major combat had ended. All in
In late 2001 an international conference in Bonn, Ger- all some 75 percent of the U.S. Navy's total force was de-
many, laid the framework for political reconstruction of ployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including
the country. Though the conference also stipulated that 221 of 306 surface ships, 33 of 54 attack submarines, and
all remaining Afghan militia forces were to be placed some 600 Navy and Marine Corps tactical aircraft.
tmder control of the new government, in reality lnost of Unfortunately not all hostilities ended with the cap-
the militias have continued to affiliate with regional and ture of Baghdad. Hussein and his sons managed to elude
tribal leaders, which has been a source of continuing caphlre for a time, but evenhlally in July both sons were
problems for the new regime. In October 2004 Hamid killed by coalition forces, and Hussein himself was cap-
Karzai became the first democratically elected president tured near Tikrit north of Baghdad in December. Mas-
of Afghanistan. sive reconstruction efforts V\Tere begun to restore Iraq's
Shortly after the start of Operation Enduring Free- infrastructure, including water and electrical power sup-
dom in Afghanistan in 2001, back at home there were plies, and retraining of Iraqi military and civilian police
several instances of contamination of news offices} postal forces to eventually take over responsibility for keeping
facilities, and eventually several State Department and order in the country began. The Coalition Provisional
Senate offices by letters containing deadly antlu'ax dis- Authority transferred sovereignty to the Iraq Interim
ease spores. These incidents ultimately resulted in the Government in June 2004, and its first president, Ghazi
deaths of several postal workers and others who came al-Ujayl al-Yawr, was elected in Janualy 2005. Regret-
into contact with the spores. It has yet to be determined tably roadside and suicide bombs and other attacks by
who sent these letters and why. insurgent forces and terrorists sympathetic to Hussein's
old regime and to al-Qaeda have continued to the pres-
ent, resulting in the deaths of thousands of American
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM
military personnel and other coalition troops and Iraqi
By 2002 continuing defiance of the terms of the 1991 civilians to date.
cease-fire agreement by Iraq's Saddam Hussein became It remains to be seen as of this writing what the long-
a major issue for the United States. Hussein had pre- term outcome of these events will be.
vented UN weapons inspection teams from inspecting
key sites on several occasions, and there \,\'ere alarming
A LOOK BACK-AND AHEAD
intelligence estimates (later disputed) that Iraq was ac-
clunulating a growing stockpile of weapons of mass de- The last decades of the twentieth century were very chal-
struction-chemical, biological, and of special concern, lenging ones for our Navy. In the Vietnam years of the
nuclear weapons. In late 2002 President Bush said that if sixties and seventies, the Navy had nearly 1,000 ships
the UN did not take more effective action to force Hus- alld 600,000 people in uniform; by the year 2005 the num-
sein to disarm, the United States might have to take uni- bers had declined to under 300 ships and 370,000 people.
lateral military action against Iraq. Joint operations with the other services are now the rule
When the UN Security Council and several other rather than the exception. Technology continues to drive
countries pressed for more time to seek a diplomatic so- toward new concepts in weapons and equipment at an
lution, the United States decided to move toward war if ever-increasing pace.
Hussein and his sons did not agree to leave Iraq. On 17 The Vietnam experience forced us to accept the facts
March 2003 President Bush gave him forty-eight hours to that even the most powerful Navy on Earth has its limi-
leave the country. When he did not do so, on 19 March tations and that we cannot expect to prevail in every con-
the United States along with coalition parhlers Britain frontation. Events such as the Iran-Contra affair, the Vill-
and several other nations began Operation Iraqi Freedom ceJtlles incident, and the Tailllook scandal have reminded
with extensive air and missile attacks against the capital us that even the best-intentioned people can make mis-
Baghdad and other key military targets. The initial at- takes. Increasing budgetary constraints following the
tacks, dubbed "Shock and Awe" tactics by Defense Secre- demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war
tary Rumsfeld, were intended to take out most of Iraq's have forced us to realize that we cannot always acquire
command and control organization while killing many of every nev\' vveapon or program we may ·want and all the
Iraq's key leaders, including Hussein himself. In the days new ships we may need. The international drug trade,
that followed, a large number of American-led coalition and terrorists at home alld abroad, have shown that our
troops invaded Iraq from the south in a blitzkrieg-like ad- modern enemies are not always easily identifiable, and
vance toward Baghdad while other airborne forces para- often cannot be directly attacked, at least not by tradi-
chuted into northern Iraq where they teamed up with tional means.