Iraq War 2003 to 2011: Rumsfeld's How Start Note, the Surge and Iran's Gain

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On November 21, 2001, weeks after the September 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reviewed a war plan for Iraq, and a note in the margins read simply how start. This episode traces the path from that meeting to the March 20, 2003 invasion: George W. Bush's axis of evil speech in January 2002, the October 2002 congressional authorization, and Colin Powell's February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council. The hosts explain how Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, skeptical of CIA assessments, leaned on outside intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, and how claims of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda ties later collapsed. France, Germany and Russia urged more inspections, Kofi Annan called the invasion illegal under the UN Charter, and the British Chilcot report of 2016 concluded peaceful options had not been exhausted.

Baghdad fell within weeks and Saddam Hussein was captured near Tikrit in December 2003, but Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority applied a denazification model through de-Baathification and disbanded the Iraqi army, sending hundreds of thousands of armed, resentful men home. Sunni and Shia factions, from al Qaeda in Iraq to Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, drove a civil war, while Abu Ghraib and Haditha damaged the coalition's standing. General David Petraeus's 2007 surge and the Awakening Councils cut violence, yet Nouri al-Maliki's government refused to absorb the Sunni militias. The episode closes with the 2011 withdrawal, the rise of ISIS, the return of U.S. troops in 2014 and an Army study naming Iran as the war's main winner.

• Coalition forces lost over 4,800 troops, plus roughly 3,650 private contractors.
• Civilian death estimates ranged from 100,000 to 113,000 by Iraq Body Count to over 650,000 excess deaths in the Lancet survey and over 1 million by Opinion Research Business.
• U.S. audits lost track of $9 billion in Iraq funds, with pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills flown into Baghdad.
• Awakening Councils put tens of thousands of Sunni militiamen on the U.S. payroll to fight al Qaeda in Iraq.
• The war's cost is estimated at between $1.7 trillion and $3 trillion.