On Oct. 5, 2017, the Iraqi Army, supported by Iran-backed military groups and American-led airstrikes, captured the city of Hawija in northern Iraq, according to BBC and the Guardian. According to an Oct. 5 BBC article, the battle lasted only a few weeks; it was another decisive victory in terms of capturing land and freeing civilians from the Islamic State. This is part of an ongoing trend that the Coalition has seen over the past couple of years of ISIS losing more and more of its major cities across Iraq. ISIS is also rapidly losing ground in Syria; a June 2017 Information Handling Services Conflict Monitor report showed that, since 2015, ISIS had lost about 60 percent of the area it once controlled in Syria and Iraq, according to a Sept. 21 BBC article. 

It is intriguing to look at the evolving U.S. policies in Iraq throughout the past 25 years and why they have been so successful as of late. According to a March 29 article in CNN, the United States had about 166,000 troops in Iraq during its peak deployment; by contrast, the Obama administration capped Iraq missions at about 5,000 U.S troops. 

To understand the recent successes against ISIS, it is helpful to look more closely at past military conflicts in the region.

America’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War, “Operation Desert Storm,”  lasted for only five weeks and took place at the beginning of 1991, during a time when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world, according to a Nov. 4, 1997 CNN article. There are a few key differences between the invasion ordered by Former President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and the invasion ordered in 2003 by his son Former President George W. Bush. The 1991 invasion was more widely supported, as the coalition included 39 countries from Egypt to Serbia to Sierra Leone, according to a July 25 CNN article. In 2003, however, most of the world, including many of the U.S.’s biggest Middle Eastern allies, such as King Abdullah of Jordan and then- Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, were against the U.S. invasion ordered by George W. Bush, according to a Feb. 17, 2003 BBC article. 

Nevertheless, George W. Bush went along with his attempt to topple Hussein with a coalition predominantly comprised of U.S. and British troops, according to a March 28, 2003 question-and-answer in the New York Times. The 1991 invasion was also backed by the U.N. Security Council, but there was no resolution authorizing the 2003 invasion. Additionally, George H.W. Bush earnestly tried, but failed, to peacefully allow Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, according to a Jan. 11, 1991 New York Times article. 

Further, George H.W. Bush’s rationale for going to war was more generally accepted. However, George W. Bush’s initial justification for going to war was largely false. He asserted that Saddam Hussein was harboring chemical and biological weapons. In a 2004 report, the CIA concluded that "no operational or collaborative relationship existed" between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda; Saddam Hussein was not planning to initiate an attack against the U.S., nor did he possess any major stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Finally, in a Jan. 16, 1991  address to the nation, George H.W. Bush made it clear that his 1991 invasion was not “the conquest of Iraq” but a “liberation of Kuwait,” and that once Kuwait will be freed, “it is our hope that Iraq will live as a peaceful and cooperative member of the family of nations.” For all of the above reasons, George H.W. Bush had broader support, and the operation was a success with relatively few Coalition and civilian casualties. 

Conversely, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was meant to conquer and defeat Saddam Hussein. According to an Oct. 15, 2013 article in the Huffington Post, this has lead to a death toll of nearly 500,000, including hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and several thousand American casualties. In 2005, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council suggested that Iraq was a haven for terrorists, according to a Jan. 14, 2005 Washington Post article, something that it wasn’t when the secular Saddam Hussein was in power. It should be noted that terrorists still existed in Saddam’s Iraq, but they had little or no influence over the population and controlled no land as Saddam Hussein maintained an iron grip on power. According to the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, suicide bombings increased in 2003 after U.S. intervention.

In addition to the reasons listed above, there are major mistakes that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the temporary U.S. led government of Iraq, made which angered a lot of Iraqis and ultimately made them resentful towards the U.S.’s operations in Iraq. These erroneous decisions made by the American leadership subsequently contributed to the domestic Iraqi opposition towards the U.S. And in any civil war, domestic opposition to an authority eventually turns into an armed insurgency and a rapid deterioration of the situation.    First and foremost, Paul Bremer — the leader of the CPA — decided to disband the Iraqi Army and fire hundreds of thousands of Saddam’s B’ath regime linked soldiers, according to a May 28, 2015 Time article. These now unsalaried and armed soldiers were indignant of the new administration and are arguably the most significant part of the insurgency which turned into ISIS. In fact, many of ISIS’s top leaders were former Iraqi Soldiers trained by Hussein, according to a May 28, 2015 Time article. The coalition also decided to fire about 11,000 former Ba’ath regime Iraqi schoolteachers. Furthermore, as the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties began to accrue, many Iraqis felt that the CPA was indiscriminately attacking civilians, which provided further impetus for the insurgency, according to a February 2016 report from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. These reasons, along with the CPA’s failure to control the sudden power vacuum after Hussein’s fall, further fueled the insurgency and the sectarian violence thereafter. 

In June 2014, Obama ordered airstrikes against ISIS targets in Iraq at the formal request of the Iraqi government, according to the Department of Defense. He also ordered an airdrop of food, water and medical supplies for civilians fleeing ISIS around the Sinjar Mountains, according to an Aug. 7, 2014 ABC News article. In an Aug. 7, 2014 speech, Obama outlined that his airstrikes were meant to protect Americans in Erbil advising Iraqi forces, to prevent a possible genocide by ISIS on Yazidi minorities and give all humans “the desire to live with basic freedom and dignity.” A coalition of dozens of other nations followed suit and in over a span of only a few years, ISIS has lost over 70 percent of the territory it once claimed in Iraq, according to a June 29 article in the Independent. In general, Obama’s intervention had received general international and domestic support, which is one of the main reasons why it has been successful. 

U.S. military intervention in Iraq has been far more successful when it has more general support. Conversely, George W. Bush decided to almost unilaterally declare war on Saddam Hussein, which led to disastrous consequences that the world is still attempting to clean up. This shows that, as President George H.W. Bush stated, “no nation can stand against a world united.”