As President Obama prepares to ramp up the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he has repeatedly said that the United States’ role in the Middle East won’t look anything like President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
To this end, Obama and many of his democratic allies have consistently characterized the Bush’s Iraq offensive as “unilaterally,” with the U.S. military going into Iraq alone.
Did Bush really go into Iraq alone? And, to what end was the U.S. invasion unilateral?
The reality is that Bush built an international coalition of more than 40 nations when he invaded Iraq. But at the same time, the U.S. military made up the vast majority of troops on the ground, with only Britain, Australia and South Korea providing a meaningful number of troops. The other nations provided intelligence, military resources and some troops, but the battle was largely fought by the U.S. military.
So it’s false to say the U.S. went into Iraq alone.
However, the U.S. invasion was, and continues to be, characterized as unilateral largely because it lacked support from a multinational organization like the United Nations or NATO. The U.S. actually tried to convince the U.N. to support military action but member states of the U.N. refused to provide the U.S. with the authorization it wanted.
As Obama prepares to fight the new threat in the Middle East posed by ISIS, he is explicitly going out of his way to build a broad international coalition and gain the support of the U.N. and NATO. The president has gone so far as to say that while ground troops are needed to defeat ISIS ultimately, it won’t be the U.S. military that will be fighting on the ground.
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So, as things stand, Obama’s strategy looks very different from Bush’s.
