Iraq War

Following the 1991 Gulf War, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 mandated that Iraqi chemical, biological, nuclear, and long range missile programs be halted and all such weapons destroyed under United Nations Special Commission control. U.N. weapons inspectors inside Iraq were able to verify the destruction of a large amount of WMD-material, but substantial issues remained unresolved after they left Iraq in 1998 due to current UNSCOM head Richard Butler's belief that U.S. and U.K. military action was imminent. Shortly after the inspectors withdrew, the U.S. and U.K. launched a four-day bombing campaign.

In addition to the inspection regimen, the U.S. and U.K (along with France until 1998) engaged in a low-level conflict with Iraq by enforcing northern and southern Iraqi no-fly zones. These zones were created following the Persian Gulf War to protect Iraqi Kurdistan in the north and the southern Shia areas, and were seen by the Iraqi government as an infringement of Iraq's sovereignty. Iraqi air-defense installations and American and British air patrols regularly exchanged fire during this period.

In April 2001, Bush's Cabinet agreed to use military intervention in Iraq, because it was considered a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.[64] Neoconservatives in the U.S. called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields and planned for a coup d'etat long before the September 11th attacks, hoping a new government would use, "Iraq's oil to destroy the OPEC cartel through massive increases in production above OPEC quotas." Those plans were abandoned shortly after the invasion because former Shell Oil Company CEO Philip Carroll, who had been charged with their implementation, refused to be involved with Iraqi oil industry privatization since it could have led to the exclusion of U.S. firms,[65][66] unlike the state-run oil ministry.[67] U.S. oil industry consultant Falah Aljibury alleged that soon after Bush took office in 2001, he took part in secret meetings in Washington, the Middle East, and California involving an overthrow of the Iraq regime. Aljibury told BBC's Newsnight that he, "interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration."[68]

Approximately one year before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. initiated Operation Southern Focus as a change to its response strategy, by increasing the overall number of missions and selecting targets throughout the no-fly zones in order to disrupt the military command structure in Iraq. The weight of bombs dropped on Iraq increased from none in March 2002 and 0.