A little over a decade after Operation Desert Storm (1991), when Coalition forces liberated Kuwait following the 1990 Iraqi invasion, General Tommy Franks and his air boss Lieutenant General Michael (Buzz) Mosley, initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom; this time to liberate the Iraqi people from the rule of fear imposed by Saddam Hussein. This action, often referred to as Gulf War II, was undertaken for a number of reasons and envisaged a number of goals.

The immediate causes for the new war included a firm belief that Saddam had reinitiated his efforts to produce—or at least acquire—Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defecting Iraqi scientists had outlined his efforts to create mobile laboratories capable of growing spores for anthrax. There was evidence that he was acquiring equipment needed to produce weapons-grade radioactive materials. Large amounts of his pre-1991 war poison gas stockpile had not been accounted for by the United Nations inspection teams. And during the years following 1991, the Iraqi dictator had cunningly thwarted the efforts of the UN weapons inspection teams, sent to Iraq in accordance with the agreements that ended the Desert Storm conflict.

The longer-term causes go back to Desert Storm itself and its aftermath.

We can start with the widespread opinion, which grew up after Desert Storm, that we had halted the operation short of its necessary goal, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his criminal cronies . . . a view stated publicly by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. Given the terrorist atrocities of 2001 and later, they may well have been right.

But history has twenty-twenty hindsight.

At the end of February 1991, we had achieved our stated goal in Desert Storm, the liberation of occupied Kuwait. Though the total liberation of Iraq was always an obvious option, we rejected that option in our military councils. There we had discussed the difficulty we would incur fighting an Iraqi enemy defending his home as opposed to one who was pillaging and raping a fellow Arab nation. We were also concerned about adding the severe problems of administering aid to a large and complex country like Iraq to the already daunting problems of assisting current refugees and those ravaged by war in Kuwait.