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source: Anthony Quintano: American Flags in Boston Commons

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Essential Learnings- Explain the causes of World War II, the character of the war at home and abroad and  it's re-shaping of the US role in the world.- Analyze how the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and international politics.- Read for understanding from both secondary and primary sources to construct historical meaning.- Apply historical thinking skills to contemporary problems or issues.

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Essential Learnings- Explain the causes of World War II, the character of the war at home and abroad and  it's re-shaping of the US role in the world.- Analyze how the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and international politics.- Read for understanding from both secondary and primary sources to construct historical meaning.- Apply historical thinking skills to contemporary problems or issues.

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About the Library of Congress Veteran's History Project

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About the Library of Congress Veteran's History Project

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VHP Field Kit

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Veterans History Project: Field Kit Companion Video

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Learn how you can participate in the Veterans History Project with this short video.

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Use the databases on the West Valley Library page for information. The best for this project are: Global Issues in Context, World History in Context and American History in Context. They will even make the citation for you to copy and paste into Noodle Tools!
Need help with databases or Noodle Tools? See your WVHS library staff!

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This is your major handout.

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Mr. Genson's Requirements

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Mr. Genson's Rubric

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Notes Model

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Blank Document

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Use this for guidance in interviewing your veteran

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Your Start to Finish Guide

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A Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress

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A Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress

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Understand  the lives of American war veterans through their personal stories.

There are hundreds of stories to explore.

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Companion website for the book Forever a Soldier.
http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/foreverasoldier/

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Alaska Historical Society

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By Jim Ducker

America has been fortunate. Assaults on our nation on the scale of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have been rare. With few exceptions, the United States has not suffered at the hands of a military invader since the War of 1812 with Great Britain. One of the exceptions occurred in Alaska during World War II, when the Japanese invaded and captured some of the Aleutian Islands.

Tensions had run high between Japan and the United States in 1940 and 1941. America prepared for war, and in Alaska that meant inserting troops and building defenses. After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Alaskans and Americans along the West Coast worried that the Japanese fleet, somewhere in the vast Pacific, would unleash another surprise attack on their homes. And in June 1942 that fear became reality in Alaska. Within a few days, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and occupied Kiska Island, in the western Aleutians.

The Nichols family lived out the tense early days of the war at Kodiak. Vernon Nichols, an unemployed carpenter in his mid 40s, shipped to Kodiak out of Seattle in April 1941. He worked for a private construction company under contract to build a Navy base on the island. For a home on the island, he built a one-room shanty on a hillside between town and the base south of the community. His wife, Ruth, and their children, Gary 7 and Nancy 5, steamed north on the SS Baranoff in November, arriving in Kodiak on December 5, just two days before Pearl Harbor. Vernon's job lasted just a year. After a couple month's delay necessitated by concerns over Japanese action in the area, the family relocated to Anchorage in June 1942, where Vernon got carpentry work at Fort Richardson.

Below is a letter written by Ruth to her Aunt Cora in the Lower 48 describing what the early days of the war meant to her family:

Letter to Auntie

From East Anchorage
July 17, 1942

I know you must have had an anxious wait while we were marooned at Kodiak. For almost four weeks we were on alert because the Jap fleet was on its way to the Aleutians . . . . There was no radio broadcast at Kodiak, no air mail, and no ships of any kind either, in or out.

I am going to tell you about the last weeks we were there, as it is old news now and I don't think the censors will blot it out. I think I told you, we were living on a hillside above a dock. Well the dock was bought by the Army while we were there and the area around it became a military reservation, with barbed wire entanglements and guards and so on, right within a stone's throw of our back door.

Previous to this, at the outbreak of the war, two soldiers from an anti-aircraft battery were stationed just below us. They had a cabin, and as they were our nearest neighbors, we got quite well acquainted with several of them, as they changed boys every few days. So you see, we knew about it every time there was an alert and there were plenty of them. A lot of them were to keep the soldiers on their toes, of course, but often there were unidentified planes or ships sighted and they would be on the alert until radio communications was established with them. After the first and only air raid alarm shortly after we arrived in December, we lived all winter very quietly except for one alert in February. It was in the forenoon and I noticed the boys below us out with their scope and telephone and knew they were on an alert, but it was quite a little later that I happened to open the door and saw a trench about a hundred feet away full of soldiers with rifles and machine guns. Then I began to look around and saw the whole hillside full of soldiers and some were busily setting up guns on the road above the house. Then one of our soldier neighbors came up and told Nancy and I to stay in the house, so I knew they really meant business. There had been no air raid alarm but I got our things ready, so we could leave in a hurry, if necessary.

Nothing happened, however, and in an hour all the soldiers, but our neighbor boys, were gone. That time, two ships had slipped into the mouth of the harbor without being observed and until they found out who they were, they were prepared for whatever might happen. I was a bit uneasy after that about our evacuation plan. I couldn't help but imagine how it would be with all that artillery around us and trucks crowding the road, so I was relieved when the Governor Gruening paid Kodiak a visit and, after learning of their plans for evacuation, promptly ordered that they be abandoned and everyone build slit trenches in their backyards for shelter. One or two of the neighbor women and I had already decided, we'd rather hold up in caves in the cliffs, than go on a bus to our evacuation destination.

Vernon made us a trench back of the house under some bushes. It had a spring of water in the bottom of it. We didn't have to use it, of course, but there was a time, shortly before we left and after the bombing of Dutch Harbor, that we certainly expected to. That morning, Vernon was home with a bad cold. When I first got up, one of the soldiers called to me and said for us to prepare for a raid, as word had come from headquarters that Jap planes were heading our way and could be expected in two hours. So I got everyone up and we had breakfast and then I fixed some emergency food and the children and I put some dry boards in the bottom of our trench and I got canvas and blankets to make it comfortable.

After that, I found I was going to the window about every minute or so to scan the skies for planes, so I decided to clean house and do some baking, just as though nothing was going to happen. The Japs didn't show up and I was all to the good with some good food and a nice clean house when the alert was over. It was only about 24 hours after that, that our three week alert was over. The Japanese fleet had been beaten at Midway and we were safe, we thought.

In a few days boats were arriving, and when the first one came to Kodiak we hustled around and got our freight down to the dock and closed our deal for the sale of the shanty and spent the last night of our stay in Kodiak, in a room in town. So many men were leaving, we were lucky to have a place to stay. A lot of them slept in the streets that night. The next morning we went to the restaurant for breakfast, then for a little hike to pass the time.

. . . As we went through town we saw a bulletin on the steamship company windows, saying our boat was in and would be sailing at 3:00, so we had to hurry and get our lunch and go on board. The minister's wife and another friend, with whom I was quite well acquainted, came down to see us off.

It is so different for us here [Anchorage]. We are away from the military sights except for an airplane once in a while and now and then a truck. The day we left our house in Kodiak we watched them setting up a big anti-aircraft gun within a hundred feet of our house. I told the boys, I was very glad to be leaving, as I didn't want to even see them fire it in practice. There was one on the hill back of our house, that was always going off and making us jump.

We often watched them at target practice. A plane would fly around with a target on a long rope trailing behind, and the guns, in several different positions, would take their turns firing at the target. Also, got to see an anti-aircraft drill on one of the transports, as it lay below us at the dock.

I'm sorry that Mama worries over us so. She never writes that she doesn't beg us to come home. If she could only know how it really is. Alaska is so big, very few realize that. We are 1700 miles from Attu and Kiska and the Japs have been shooting much closer to you at Astoria and in B.C., than they ever were to us, even at Dutch Harbor. Dutch Harbor is about 800 miles from Kodiak. There are lots of places to go here, if they ever get this far, just as there are in the States. Quite a lot of the families, who evacuated last winter, are coming back. It is very hard to get men with families to stay here and work, unless they can have their families with them.

The AHS thanks Gary Nichols and Nancy Nichols Demmitt for permission to publish the letter.
For more information on World War II in Alaska, see:
Brian Garfield, The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians, revised edition (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1995)

A laska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered, edited by Fern Chandonnet (Anchorage: Alaska at War Committee, 1995)

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WWII Comes to Kodiak: The Nichols Family Experience

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By Jim Ducker America has been fortunate. Assaults on our nation on the scale of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have been rare. With few exceptions, the United States has not suffered at the hands of a military invader since the War of 1812 with Great Britain.

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Anchorage Museum

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The Treaty of Versailles brought World War I to an end, but it laid the foundation for WWII.

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Covers the Peace of Paris
Economic problems
nationalism
the Nazi Party
rise of dictatorships
aggressive territorial expansion
the Spanish Civil War
the failure of appeasement

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

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and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

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The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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Discovery Education video

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This article provides an overview of the global impact of the war.
death and destruction
displaced persons
new power struggles
the nuclear age

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

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and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

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The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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Displaced Persons and Those Effected by Famine

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Displaced Persons and Those Effected by Famine

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Image from World Book Online

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Interactive Timeline

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First Washington Conference: ARCADIA

The First Washington Conference, code-named ARCADIA, from December 22, 1941 to January 14, 1942, set the strategic direction for the Anglo-American war effort and established the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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The War | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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The First Washington Conference, code-named ARCADIA, from December 22, 1941 to January 14, 1942, set the strategic direction for the Anglo-American war effort and established the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history
The instability created in Europe by the First World War (1914-18) set the stage for another international conflict–World War II–which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating. Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi Party) rearmed the nation and signed strategic treaties with Italy and Japan to further his ambitions of world domination. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, and World War II had begun. Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war. Among the estimated 45-60 million people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust.

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Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters During World War II

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women front journalists photographers broadcasters wwii world war ii library congress exhibition

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Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters of World War II spotlights eight women who succeeded in

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The Korean Conflict
Article includes causes, land war, air and naval activity, and the end of the war.

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Discovery Education

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Extensive information regarding NATO after WWII, its role in Korea, and the buildup of tensions in the Middle East

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The Vietnam War pitted communist North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and the United States. The war ended when U.S. forces withdrew in 1973 and Vietnam unified under Communist control two years later.

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Watch full films from TV's most-watched history series.

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Interactive Timeline | Interactive Timeline | Vietnam War Commemoration

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Browse the historical Interactive Timeline on the United States Vietnam War Commemoration web site.

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Overview from World Book

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

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The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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Battles, Strategies and the Reaction at Home

August 2, 1990 — February 28, 1991

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history's most fascinating questions.
From the time U.S. combat troops began shipping over to Vietnam in 1965 to fight the spread of communism, Americans weren't quite sure what to make of the war playing out in jungles and rice paddies halfway across the world. But in the eyes of millions of Americans, one thing seemed likely: It was only a matter of time before the United States, a global superpower with vastly superior military might, would prevail.

Then came Tet.

It was 2:45 a.m., on Jan. 30, 1968-the day Vietnam celebrated the lunar new year-when Viet Cong troops raced through a three-foot hole they had blown in a wall protecting the United States Embassy in Saigon. Thus began the Tet Offensive, in which thousands of communist-backed Viet Cong fighters waged a series of major assaults on big cities, provincial hamlets and regional capitals across U.S.-backed South Vietnam-more than 100 locations in the first 24 hour alone. In addition to the bloody fighting in the Embassy courtyard, they waged fierce attacks on strategic targets such as the presidential palace, Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport and the city of Hue, once a seat of emperors. In subsequent days, more waves of the offensive followed.

Launched 50 years ago this week, Tet was in some key respects a military bust for the Viet Cong. American and South Vietnamese troops quickly regrouped, fended off the attackers (the embassy invaders were quelled within hours) and ultimately killed as many as 40,000 enemy soldiers. The Viet Cong's "regular units were decimated and would never completely recover, and its political infrastructure suffered crippling losses," wrote Vietnam War historian George Herring.

Nonetheless, they wouldn't fold. The Vietnamese had a long history of resisting outside forces-most recently French colonials. So the war ground on, beamed nightly into American living rooms on the evening news. Tet became a turning point-not militarily on the ground, but in terms of politics, policy and public opinion back in the United States.

Tet would become a political disaster for President Lyndon Johnson 's administration, overshadowing his considerable domestic policy successes in attacking poverty, creating social safety nets and codifying civil rights. The offensive sowed profound doubts about the war's course-exposing the truth that, in spite of the presence of some 500,000 American military personnel in Vietnam, three years of fighting and heavy casualties had yielded nothing more than a protracted, bloody stalemate. Ultimately, it triggered a series of forces and events that gradually led to the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam by 1975.
Halting the Red Tide
By the time Viet Cong combatants took up positions in the American embassy courtyard, Vietnam had become a test case of America's resolve in waging the Cold War. Since the mid-1950s, American strategists and elected officials had considered Vietnam key to the containment of communism across the globe. If the United States let communists grab control of South Vietnam, official doctrine held, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall with domino-like precision. Installing-and maintaining-non-communist leadership in South Vietnam became central to America's Cold War strategy.

"Strategically, South Vietnam's capture by the Communists would bring their power several hundred miles into a hitherto free region," warned President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959. "The loss of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom."

Three years later, President John F. Kennedy concurred: "Withdrawal [of U.S forces] in the case of Vietnam and the case of Thailand might mean a collapse of the entire area." Just as an earlier generation of critics had said Harry Truman had "lost" China to the communists, no president wanted to be the one responsible for letting Vietnam turn Red.
One Miscalculation After the Next
America's entry into the war-one of the most chronicled stories of 20th century U.S. history-hinged on a series of fundamental miscalculations. When Kennedy approved a C.I.A. coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnam's leader Ngo Dinh Diem and the overthrow of his government, America in effect became responsible for the fate of South Vietnam. And yet the subsequent U.S.-backed regimes there were corrupt, repressive and lacking in popular support, since South Vietnamese leaders suppressed Buddhist religious worship, rounded up anti-government critics and enriched themselves. At the same time, the most respected minds in American foreign policy concluded that a third-world army such as North Vietnam's could never match the military superpower that had defeated fascist Germany and Japan just two decades earlier.

Another miscalculation that set the stage for political disaster: the sunny public messaging U.S. officials put out regarding the war's progress. In a speech four months before the surprise Tet attacks, LBJ claimed "steady" and even "dramatic" progress from when he first sent substantial numbers of troops there in 1965. Soon after, General William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander who had overseen the war since 1964, declared to the American people that the conflict's end was in sight. Meanwhile, the Defense Department fed the public artificial, often inflated tallies of weekly enemy casualties.

Washington also underestimated the enemy's capacity for conducting a war on multiple fronts. The North Vietnamese army's 77-day bombardment and siege of Khe Sanh, a five-square-mile Marine garrison, beginning January 21, 1968, riveted much of America's attention and became an obsession for Johnson, who insisted the fort couldn't be lost. Believing the enemy didn't have the combat strength to maintain the siege and launch a massive offensive elsewhere, the president and his military commanders were caught off-guard when, less than two weeks after the Khe Sanh siege began, the massive Tet offensive commenced. As one Washington official put it, "troubled confusion and uncertainty" now reigned in the capital.
The Government Told One Story, TV News Told Another
The U.S. news media, especially television reporters, captured much of the war's bloodshed with vivid images and narratives broadcast into Americans' living rooms night after night. The stories and pictures contradicted Johnson administration reports that victory was within America's grasp.

On February 27, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, a pillar of respectability and hardly an antiwar radical, solemnly informed millions of viewers that after his recent visit to the battlefields of Vietnam, it was unclear "who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities." But, he added, "It seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

The media's coverage of Tet overall-honest, fair-minded, unflinching-shaped Americans' evolving views that the Vietnam War simply couldn't be won by any conventional military standard. A photograph by the Associated Press's Eddie Adams, showing a South Vietnamese national police commander putting a bullet through the brain of a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street, made front-page news worldwide. The image, The New York Times later reflected, sparked "an immediate revulsion at a seemingly gratuitous act of savagery that was widely seen as emblematic of a seemingly gratuitous war."

Peter Arnett of the Associated Press quoted a U.S. Army officer who had just helped liberate Ben Tre, a delta town, as saying, "We had to destroy the town to save it." Vietnam, it seemed to more and more Americans, was requiring the United States to sacrifice the very ideals it was supposedly fighting for: liberty, democracy, human rights, the rule of law.

For millions of Americans, it was more than they could stomach. Tet, for many, crystallized the war's costs-moral, strategic, in lives lost, dollars wasted. In December 1967, a Gallup poll found the American public almost evenly split on the question of whether sending troops to fight in Vietnam was a mistake. By August 1968, 53 percent thought sending troops was a mistake, versus 35 percent who said it wasn't. Tet was one big factor that had swayed hearts and minds.
Political Fallout, Lasting Legacy
In early March 1968, General Westmoreland asked the White House for an additional 206,000 troops. But LBJ, unpopular, isolated and foundering, rejected the request. Public support for his handling of the war cratered-and with it, his hopes for a second term. Antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy fell just a few hundred votes shy of defeating the sitting president in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in early March.

On March 31, faced with a mounting revolt against his war polices, Johnson announced new restrictions on U.S. bombing of North Vietnam-and, most importantly, that he would not seek a second term. Later that year, Republican presidential hopeful Richard Nixon vowed to bring "an honorable end to the war" in Vietnam, running as a hawk yet mindful of the growing clamor to draw down U.S. forces from Indochina.

After the shock of Tet, criticism mounted, even in Johnson's inner circle. His new defense secretary, Clark Clifford, called Vietnam "a bottomless pit" and envisioned "more and more fighting and more and more casualties and no end in sight." Secretary of State Dean Rusk said Tet had snuffed out hope for a U.S. win in the Vietnam War. In June, Johnson relieved Westmoreland of his command.

Tet also served as a kind of unofficial harbinger for 1968 as a whole-ushering in the chaos, violence and crisis in faith in American leadership that came to define the troubled year. Tet helped quicken the public's declining faith in its political leaders and institutions-giving both left and right fresh ammunition to depict career politicians as liars. This crisis of faith in political leadership has sunk roots in our culture. Career politicians are routinely denounced as dissemblers who care more about their own re-election than serving their constituents or the national interest.

Tet has also, at least faintly so, echoed in subsequent U.S. wars. When a civil war broke out in Iraq after President George W. Bush had declared "mission accomplished," the dangers of overselling the public on a war's progress came into full, painful view.

Finally, Tet calls to mind another legacy: Presidents who decide to send thousands of American soldiers to fight overseas have much less control over what happens on the ground than they like to think. Thus, leaders who refuse to learn the lesson of Tet-about the costs of war on American lives and the lives of other peoples-risk falling into a trap of false assumptions, misleading forecasts and hubris in military adventurism overseas.

Matthew Dallek, associate professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, is author, most recently, of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security.

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How the Tet Offensive Shocked Americans into Questioning if the Vietnam War Could be Won

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History Reads is a weekly series featuring work from Team History, a group of experts and influencers, exploring history's most fascinating questions. From the time U.S. combat troops began shipping over to Vietnam in 1965 to fight the spread of communism, Americans weren't quite sure what to make of the war playing out in jungles and rice paddies halfway across the world.

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What was the cause of the Iraq War?

When did the Iraq War begin?

Which United States president started the Iraq War?

When did the Iraq War end?

Iraq War, also called Second Persian Gulf War, (2003-11), conflict in Iraq that consisted of two phases. The first of these was a brief, conventionally fought war in March-April 2003, in which a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It was followed by a longer second phase in which a U.S.-led occupation of Iraq was opposed by an insurgency. After violence began to decline in 2007, the United States gradually reduced its military presence in Iraq, formally completing its withdrawal in December 2011. American military casualties in the conflict included some 4,500 service members killed and some 32,000 others wounded.
(Read Britannica's interview with Jimmy Carter on the Iraq War and world affairs.)

Prelude to war

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 ended in Iraq's defeat by a U.S.-led coalition in the Persian Gulf War (1990-91). However, the Iraqi branch of the Baʿath Party, headed by Saddam Hussein, managed to retain power by harshly suppressing uprisings of the country's minority Kurds and its majority Shiʿi Arabs. To stem the exodus of Kurds from Iraq, the allies established a "safe haven" in northern Iraq's predominantly Kurdish regions, and allied warplanes patrolled "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq that were off-limits to Iraqi aircraft. Moreover, to restrain future Iraqi aggression, the United Nations ( UN) implemented economic sanctions against Iraq in order to, among other things, hinder the progress of its most lethal arms programs, including those for the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. ( See weapon of mass destruction.) UN inspections during the mid-1990s uncovered a variety of proscribed weapons and prohibited technology throughout Iraq. That country's continued flouting of the UN weapons ban and its repeated interference with the inspections frustrated the international community and led U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in 1998 to order the bombing of several Iraqi military installations (code-named Operation Desert Fox). After the bombing, however, Iraq refused to allow inspectors to reenter the country, and during the next several years the economic sanctions slowly began to erode as neighbouring countries sought to reopen trade with Iraq.

In 2002 the new U.S. president, George W. Bush, argued that the vulnerability of the United States following the September 11 attacks of 2001, combined with Iraq's alleged continued possession and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (an accusation that was later proved erroneous) and its support for terrorist groups-which, according to the Bush administration, included al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks-made disarming Iraq a renewed priority. UN Security Council Resolution 1441, passed on November 8, 2002, demanded that Iraq readmit inspectors and that it comply with all previous resolutions. Iraq appeared to comply with the resolution, but in early 2003 President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that Iraq was actually continuing to hinder UN inspections and that it still retained proscribed weapons. Other world leaders, such as French Pres. Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, citing what they believed to be increased Iraqi cooperation, sought to extend inspections and give Iraq more time to comply with them. However, on March 17, seeking no further UN resolutions and deeming further diplomatic efforts by the Security Council futile, Bush declared an end to diplomacy and issued an ultimatum to Saddam, giving the Iraqi president 48 hours to leave Iraq. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and other countries objected to this buildup toward war.

The 2003 conflict

When Saddam refused to leave Iraq, U.S. and allied forces launched an attack on the morning of March 20; it began when U.S. aircraft dropped several precision-guided bombs on a bunker complex in which the Iraqi president was believed to be meeting with senior staff. This was followed by a series of air strikes directed against government and military installations, and within days U.S. forces had invaded Iraq from Kuwait in the south (U.S. Special Forces had previously been deployed to Kurdish-controlled areas in the north). Despite fears that Iraqi forces would engage in a scorched-earth policy-destroying bridges and dams and setting fire to Iraq's southern oil wells-little damage was done by retreating Iraqi forces; in fact, large numbers of Iraqi troops simply chose not to resist the advance of coalition forces. In southern Iraq the greatest resistance to U.S. forces as they advanced northward was from irregular groups of Baʿath Party supporters, known as Saddam's Fedayeen. British forces-which had deployed around the southern city of Basra -faced similar resistance from paramilitary and irregular fighters.

In central Iraq units of the Republican Guard-a heavily armed paramilitary group connected with the ruling party-were deployed to defend the capital of Baghdad. As U.S. Army and Marine forces advanced northwestward up the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, they bypassed many populated areas where Fedayeen resistance was strongest and were slowed only on March 25 when inclement weather and an extended supply line briefly forced them to halt their advance within 60 miles (95 km) of Baghdad. During the pause, U.S. aircraft inflicted heavy damage on Republican Guard units around the capital. U.S. forces resumed their advance within a week, and on April 4 they took control of Baghdad's international airport. Iraqi resistance, though at times vigorous, was highly disorganized, and over the next several days army and Marine Corps units staged raids into the heart of the city. On April 9 resistance in Baghdad collapsed, and U.S. soldiers took control of the city.

On that same day Basra was finally secured by British forces, which had entered the city several days earlier. In the north, however, plans to open up another major front had been frustrated when the Turkish government refused to allow mechanized and armoured U.S. Army units to pass through Turkey to deploy in northern Iraq. Regardless, a regiment of American paratroopers did drop into the area, and U.S. Special Forces soldiers joined with Kurdish peshmerga fighters to seize the northern cities of Kirkuk on April 10 and Mosul on April 11. Saddam's hometown of Tikrīt, the last major stronghold of the regime, fell with little resistance on April 13. Isolated groups of regime loyalists continued to fight on subsequent days, but the U.S. president declared an end to major combat on May 1. Iraqi leaders fled into hiding and were the object of an intense search by U.S. forces. Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003, five months after his two sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, who were central figures in their father's brutal 24-year rule, had been killed in a shoot-out with American troops after the brothers had been found hiding in a private residence. Saddam was subsequently convicted of crimes against humanity and was executed on December 30, 2006.

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Iraq War | Summary, Causes, Dates, Combatants, Casualties, & Facts

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Iraq War, conflict in Iraq (2003-11) that consisted of two phases: a conventionally fought war in March-April 2003, in which a combined force of troops primarily from the United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq and defeated Iraqi military forces, and a second phase consisting of a U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

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Council on Foreign Relations

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In March 2003, U.S. forces invaded Iraq vowing to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and end the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. When WMD intelligence proved illusory and a violent insurgency arose, the war lost public support. Saddam was captured, tried, and hanged and democratic elections were held. In the years since, there have been over 4,700 U.S. and allied troop deaths, and more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed. Meanwhile, questions linger over Iraq's fractious political situation.

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In March 2003, U.S. forces invaded Iraq vowing to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and end the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. When WMD intelligence proved illusory and a violent insurgency arose, the war lost public support. Saddam was captured, tried, and hanged and democratic elections were held.

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On this day in 2003, the United States, along with coalition forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiates war on Iraq. Just after explosions began to rock Baghdad, Iraq's capital, U.S. President George W. Bush announced in a televised address, "At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." President Bush and his advisors built much of their case for war on the idea that Iraq, under dictator Saddam Hussein, possessed or was in the process of building weapons of mass destruction.

Hostilities began about 90 minutes after the U.S.-imposed deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq or face war passed. The first targets, which Bush said were "of military importance," were hit with Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. fighter-bombers and warships stationed in the Persian Gulf. In response to the attacks, Republic of Iraq radio in Baghdad announced, "the evil ones, the enemies of God, the homeland and humanity, have committed the stupidity of aggression against our homeland and people."

Though Saddam Hussein had declared in early March 2003 that, "it is without doubt that the faithful will be victorious against aggression," he went into hiding soon after the American invasion, speaking to his people only through an occasional audiotape. Coalition forces were able to topple his regime and capture Iraq's major cities in just three weeks, sustaining few casualties. President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003. Despite the defeat of conventional military forces in Iraq, an insurgency has continued an intense guerrilla war in the nation in the years since military victory was announced, resulting in thousands of coalition military, insurgent and civilian deaths.

After an intense manhunt, U.S. soldiers found Saddam Hussein hiding in a six-to-eight-foot deep hole, nine miles outside his hometown of Tikrit. He did not resist and was uninjured during the arrest. A soldier at the scene described him as "a man resigned to his fate." Hussein was arrested and began trial for crimes against his people, including mass killings, in October 2005.

In June 2004, the provisional government in place since soon after Saddam's ouster transferred power to the Iraqi Interim Government. In January 2005, the Iraqi people elected a 275-member Iraqi National Assembly. A new constitution for the country was ratified that October. On November 6, 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. After an unsuccessful appeal, he was executed on December 30, 2006.

No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

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War in Iraq begins - Mar 19, 2003 - HISTORY.com

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On this day in 2003, the United States, along with coalition forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiates war on Iraq. Just after explosions began to rock Baghdad, Iraq's capital, U.S. President George W.

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Find out more about the history of ISIS, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

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and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

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The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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The War on Error

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the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

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and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

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The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.

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Feature on why it's so hard to win in Afghanistan

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The United States has been stuck in an unwinnable quagmire in Afghanistan for years, but it isn't the first global power to wage an unsuccessful war there. Both the British Empire and the Soviet Union were ultimately unable to create a lasting presence in Afghanistan because they weren't just fighting against the people who lived there-they were fighting against competing imperial interests in the strategically-located region.

Afghanistan has been the center of competing foreign powers for a long time. Between 1839 and 1919, the British fought in Afghanistan, each lasting no more than a few months or years (although the last war was more like a skirmish). During the first two wars, the British Empire wanted to secure the country against Russia's influence, says Shah Mahmoud Hanifi , a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at James Madison University. During the third, it wanted to secure Afghanistan against the Ottoman Empire.

Similarly, the Soviet Union's occupation of between and was bound up in its competition with American during the Cold War. The CIA covertly armed Afghanistan's mujahideen ( or "strugglers" ) during that war, meaning that the Soviets were fighting a country that was being greatly helped by another empire.

Afghanistan's strategic location- it connects Central Asia and the Middle East to South and East Asia -makes it a "kind of a policy way station towards a political agenda," explains Hanifi. So when large empires go to war in Afghanistan, they come up against other country's attempts to expert their own influence in the region.

The same is true today. Just as the U.S. secretly armed the mujahideen, NATO has accused Iran of arming the Taliban in Afghanistan. And recently, President Donald Trump asked India-which has a huge economic investment in Afghanistan-to "help us more" in the U.S. war there, . (Though Trump didn't name specifics, he was likely talking about economic aid.)

Of course, there are many other factors that make Afghanistan a tough place to wage war in. Logistically, the terrain makes it difficult to move people and equipment. In addition, "the geographic factors of terrain inform cultural values," says Hanifi, meaning that outside forces don't always understand the unique relationship between the country's 14 recognized ethnic groups and its various tribes.

For example, in the current war, Hanifi says the U.S. has emphasized working with Pashtuns in creating a government in Afghanistan. But although they're the ethnic majority, Pashtuns are spread across multiethnic and multilingual tribes, and the United States' focus on them as a monolithic group has not been successful.
Looking to Pakistan
On August 21, 2017, President Donald Trump gave a speech about his plan for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Without offering specifics, Trump said that the U.S. will continue to fight until there is a clear victory. Which means, according to experts , that there is no end in sight.

But Trump's speech wasn't just about Afghanistan. He also announced that the U.S. would take a more aggressive policy toward Pakistan, which he accused of harboring terrorists.

Unlike the U.S., Pakistan doesn't have an overarching set of laws governing all of its citizens. Tribes govern using local laws, and Trump's new plan "is a direct attempt to deny what has historically been that safe haven of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, in Pakistan," Hanifi says.

An attempt to crack down on individual tribes harboring terrorists "really does call indirectly for a radical reconfiguration of how Pakistan functions as a state," he adds.

Hanifi says that because of Afghanistan's strategic location, it's hard to imagine the U.S. ever giving up a presence in the country, even if it formally ends its war there. And with Trump's break from the United States' previous policies towards Pakistan's FATA, the situation is poised to become even more complicated.

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Why It's So Difficult to Win a War in Afghanistan

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The United States has been stuck in an unwinnable quagmire in Afghanistan for years, but it isn't the first global power to wage an unsuccessful war there. Both the British Empire and the Soviet Union were ultimately unable to create a lasting presence in Afghanistan because they weren't just fighting against the people who lived there-they were fighting against competing imperial interests in the strategically-located region.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the world book web site offers an encyclopedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and curriculum guides. world book is publisher of the world book encyclopedia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The World Book web site offers an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas, homework help, study aids, and curriculum guides. World Book is publisher of the World Book Encyclopedia.