Donald Trump’s nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barret to the increasingly partisan Supreme Court has spared a deep confirmation battle. Many are contesting whether Americans’ having a stake in the decision requires waiting until the presidential election. Nonetheless, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings on October 12th. What would a potential confirmation of a nominee with strong conservative jurisprudence mean for pending Supreme Court cases affecting millions of Americans like the ACA? How would Judge Amy’s personal convictions influence the appearance of impartiality Supreme Court justices strive to uphold? A look into the former Scalia clerk’s pro-gun, Bush v Gore, anti-ACA, immigration, and contraception views offers a glimpse into what the future of a conservative court would bring.

Judicial Advocacy v. Impartiality 

The very nature of the life-time appointment of the role is meant to shield SCOTUS justices from political influence and bias. But legal realists have established that politics substantially seeps into the courts. We’ve known for decades that when casting a pivotal vote, appearance of impartiality is all that really exists. Liberal justices are more likely to vote liberally while conservatives are more likely to vote conservatively compared to cases of non-pivotal votes.

America’s legal founders prescribed a non-partisan court with little influence on major political events. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 debates and prescriptions for judicial power in Article III of the Constitution did not intend for the Supreme Court to actually become supreme but rather, delegated that power to Congress. The founders did not intend to create supreme sovereignty in the most unrepresentative body of government.

Judge Barret’s Views: ACA, Bush v Gore, and Reproductive Law

Federal appellate judge and former law clerk to the late Justice Scalia Amy Coney Barret has energized Trump’s conservative base because of her well-documented writings on law. Her views fall in line with Trump’s requirements for a nominee — opposing Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act. Judge Amy has also strongly criticized the Obama administration’s rule that required religious employers to provide a full range of contraceptives to their female employees. Amy Coney Barrett even served on the team that represented Bush in the 2000 recount battle against Al Gore that won him the presidency. 

She has stated that if confirmed, she would follow in the footsteps of Scalia, “His judicial philosophy is mine, too.” Her confirmation would lock in a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. After the super-spreader Rose Garden event, it is uncertain whether she will be confirmed so close to an election. 

The court is scheduled to hear the Affordable Care Act case on November 10. With an Amy Coney Barrett confirmation, the SCOTUS would throw out the ACA, gut protections for those with preexisting conditions and slash coverage for lower-income individuals. This is a death sentence for thousands who rely on the act. Her opposition to the ACA is well-documented. As a professor, she wrote In an early 2017 law review essay criticizing Chief Justice John Roberts’ rationale that saved the Affordable Care Act in 2012. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power.” 

Immigration and Her Public Charge View

In June 2020, she dissented from a 7th Circuit panel that supported a US district court decision to temporarily block a Trump policy that disadvantaged green card applicants who apply for any public assistance. The battle was over immigration regulations over when an applicant is deemed a public charge and ineligible for permanent residency in the US. Barrett wrote that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the relevant “public charge” law was not “unreasonable.” 

Guns: Siding With a Felon On Their Right to Possess Arms 

Judge Amy has expressed a fervent and broad support of. Her interpretation of the 2nd Amendment was documented as she, dissenting from her two conservative colleagues, sided with a plaintiff who claimed his serious felony conviction should not have prohibited him from possessing firearms. Thereby, taking an outlier approach to Second Amendment analysis that no federal appeals court has. Judge Amy also endorsed a gun lobby-backed interpretation of a 14th century English firearms law. Her salient views even earned her the praise of the NRA on her record and endorsed her confirmation. 

Judge Barret’s views could have serious consequences on gun safety in the US where gun violence is a major problem. The US is 5% of the population yet responsible for 31% of global mass shootings. Since 1996, 167 of mass shooters’ weapons were obtained legally, yet somehow keeping guns out of the hands of criminals has become a partisan issue costing endless lives. A conservative majority could rule background checks on all gun sales, a policy supported by over 90% of American voters and gun owners, unconstitutional. Red flag laws are also at stake.

McConell will move the nomination forward despite the recent spread of coronavirus among Senators after the Rose Garden nomination event. 

“And when we talk about real change it is incredible to me the degree to which Congress continues to ignore our bloated $740 billion defense budget—which has gone up by over $100 billion since Trump has been in office.”

The Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $740.5 billion to the defense budget while including a plan to rename bases named after Confederates. This comes after voting down Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposed 10% cut in defense funding. 

The vote was passed this Thursday 86-14 after the House passed the annual NDAA days earlier. The bill allocated $536.4 billion to the Pentagon, $25.9 billion towards national security within the DOE, and $59 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations account.

During a pandemic where unemployment claims have risen by 50 million, and our greatest national security threat is COVID-19, the Senate is focusing its efforts on lining the pockets of the defense contractors. While people face evictions, job losses, hunger, and the country a 45% potential increase in homelessness, we’re focused on continuing to inflate the military budget unnecessarily. 

An Increased Military Budget

Since Trump came into office, he has increased defense spending by 100 billion — 20% more than Obama. A simple 10% cut could free up $74 billion to help Americans. While it is true that our large budget ranks number one due to higher costs of living, substantial cuts can be made. The United States spends more on national defense than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil – combined. The current U.S. budget exceeds China’s military spending by 3-1 an Russia’s by over 10-1. It acounts for 15% of all federal government spending and 3.2% of GDP. It makes up over one-third of all global military spending, and three times that of military power China.

For FY2019, the Department of Defense’s budget authority was $693,058,000,000.

• Military Personnel (No MERHFC)$143,198 
• Operations and Maintenance $278,803 
• Procurement $147,287
•  RDT&E $95,253 
• Revolving and Management Funds $1,656 
• Defense Bill (No MERHFC) $666,197 
• Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Fund Contribution (MERHFC) $7,533 
• Department of Defense Bill Plus MERHFC $673,730 
• Military Construction $9,688 
• Family Housing $1,565 
• Military Construction Bill $11,253 
• Total Base + OCO + Emergency (DoD Record) $684,985 
• Total DoD Mandatory (DoD Record) $8,073 
• DoD Total $693,058

Proposed Cuts

Experts have proposed a few cuts that save us $40 billion. Instead of increasing nuclear spending programs by 17% to $50 billion, reductions can be made in this area. The Pentagon also acknowledges that $25 billion is wasted every year. A few more cuts can help the government reduce its superfluous military budget by about $40 billion.

However, Senator Sanders’ proposal went further by calling for a feasible 10% cut that could be invested in education, healthcare and anti-poverty programs. The vote failed, because investing in an educated and healthy citizenry more capable of working and growing the economy is too much to ask for for corporatist congressmen and women.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “If the horrific pandemic we are now experiencing has taught us anything, it is that national security is not just building bombs, missiles, jet fighters, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction.”

The Military Industrial Complex

Sanders concluded, “And as President Eisenhower said as he left office in 1961: ‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’”

Even Eisenhower, facing a Soviet threat urged for us to balance defense with diplomacy.

Eisenhower: “We must learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”

The U.S. military hasn’t fought for our “freedom” since WWII, instead focused its efforts on interventionist regime change wars that have overthrown democratically elected governments, bolstered authoritarian oppressive regimes in Latin America and the Middle-East. Then, absolved itself of the responsibility of the suffering inflicted by those regimes. Has the defense budget fought for our freedoms in its overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iraq, Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Chile, Iran, and Nicaragua? Or was that just part of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in protection of the “Open Door” economy?

Performative legislation results in surface-level reforms such as name-changes while preserving the oligarchy’s stranglehold on the working-class –on the investment and growth of the economy — through a focus on a military budget that has increased by 100 billion since Trump took office.

The Iraq war is often cited as one of the worst intelligence failures in modern foreign policy history. The conflict claimed the lives of over 250,000 people under the false pretense that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction (Matthews). Historians and foreign policy experts contest whether the framing of the intelligence resulted in war, or if it was a lack of quality intelligence. A rational choice model perspective on war tells us the rational choice stems from utilitarianism — the strategic pursuit of the outcome with the highest expected utility weighted by probability. The solution to the rational choice model is more and better information, so if an increased amount and accuracy of intelligence had been made available to Congress, a $2 trillion war could have been prevented. Declassified intelligence documents analyzed by experts by officials suggest Congress was led into war by officials who made statements that intelligence agencies knew to be false (Mazzetti). Increased, accurate dissemination of intelligence on Iraq’s true status on weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical weapons could possibly have prevented war — an outcome were utility was no maximized.

 “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,” U.S. President George W. Bush announced in an address. On March 9, 2003 the U.S. and U.K. launched the invasion of Iraq after building a case for war under the pretense that Saddam Hussein was in possession, or in the process of possessing weapons of mass destruction. Under the rational choice model of war, countries seek utilitarianism and protecting themselves from an enemy who is said to possess nuclear weapons is acting within utility maximization. That information campaign is what President Bush and his advisors built their case for war around. 

However, the underlying intelligence used to propagate and frame the case for war was not accurately conveyed — Bush and his advisors made statements to rally public and congressional support that intelligence agencies knew to be false (Mazzetti). Would an honest dissemination of intelligence have changed the course of history and prevented war?

Within a liberalism view, behavior in conflict between two nations stems from a rational pursuit. The rational choice model perspective contends that utility is the optimal rational choice and players should pursue the course of action with the highest utility. This is done by weighing utility by probability and pursuing the highest-ranking option. In 2003, Congress acted under the belief that they were maximizing utility by protecting the US from weapons of mass destruction. However, they were misled. Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and other officials deliberately misled Congress about the true intelligence regarding Iraq and nuclear weapons. Moreover, intelligence operatives did not speak up as the administration cherry-picked and built its argument for war. The Bush administration’s framing of the intelligence led the US into war.

An increase in the amount and accuracy of information shared with Congress could have possibly made them decide not to enter war in 2003, thereby leading to a more rational choice that would have increased utility and not led to over 250,000 casualties. While Bush advisors like Cheney built the public case for war by making absolute claims such as, “Many are convinced Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” the intelligence agencies reports did not corroborate that (Walcott).

Records shows that White House officials’ argument for entering war was not substantiated by intelligence (Kessler). A 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee report examined U.S. government officials’ public statements made in 2003 and found that they elaborated on the limited intelligence they had and the administration withheld key information that could have undermined its case for war. 

From late 2002 and early 2003 Bush and other public officials such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Condoleeza Rice propagated the threat of Iraq’s nuclear weapons (Matthews). Rice on multiple occasions warning,“The first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ … may be a mushroom cloud.” On October 7, 2002 Bush declared without doubt that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.” He also stated that Saddam Hussein had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons but CIA Director George Tenet later stated in 2004 that the CIA informed policy makers they had “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.”

Later, in December 2002, Bush stated, “We do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon,” despite the fact that the NIE testified that they said “Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.” On September 7, 2002, Bush also claimed that a new UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report stated that Iraq was six months from developing a nuclear weapon when there wasn’t such a report (Matthews).

Moreover, Dick Cheney and Bush continued claiming that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, stating Hussein was “a threat because he’s dealing with al-Qaeda,” despite Rice and other policy makers receiving a memo summarizing intelligence concluding little evidence of links. 

Cheney pushed this link even after the intelligence was discredited — suggesting that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks “ even as the story was falling apart under scrutiny by the FBI, CIA and the foreign government that first made the allegation (Kessler).”

It wasn’t just faulty intelligence that led the US into war with Iraq, but also a misinformation campaign on the part of the Bush administration that propagated the unsubstantiated myth that Iraq had obtained WMD, and that Hussein was linked to 9/11 — which Bush admitted in 2006 was not the case. Finally, in August 2002 Cheney proclaimed at outright lie, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” despite the fact that there was “no confirmed intelligence at that point establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation (Matthews).”

Utility is based on probability and favorable outcome but deciding a strategic military action based on incomplete or elaborated intelligence can not maximize it in order to make a rational choice. The 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Iraq/al-Qaeda statements “were not substantiated by the intelligence,” and that CIA reports dismissed the myth that Iraq and al-Qaeda were cooperating and that there wasn’t any intelligence corroborating the Bush administration’s statements that Iraq would provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda (Kessler).

The investigation also found that there was no intelligence in 2003 confirming a meeting between the 9/11 hijacker and an Iraqi intelligence officer (Kessler). This meant the Bush administration had misconstrued the actual intelligence to build a case for launching war against Iraq.

However, it wasn’t only the framing of the information that caused the Iraq war, but the quality of the intelligence which held no consensus on the Iraqi government’s status on nuclear weapons. Before the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, some agencies believed Iraq was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program, but there were sharp dissents from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy — the main source of nuclear weapons expertise. The Bush administration chose not to disclose this dissenting information and presented as fact that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when no intelligence agencies stated that as fact (Kessler). 

The intelligence agencies also complied with the Bush administrations cherry-picked incomplete narrative censored of all dissent which was provided to Congress (Stein). The NIE wrongly warned that Iraq was “reconstituting its nuclear program” and “has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities,” on October 2002. The NIE report also noted that the State Department assigned low confidence to the notion of “whether in desperation Saddam would share chemical or biological weapons with Al Qaeda.”

 The State Department also concluded that “the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program,” and “claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa” are “highly dubious.” However, only six senators read the complete report containing all of these facts putting doubt to the Bush administration’s cause for war (Stein).

If the solution to the rational choice model is increased and better information, the Bush administration’s propagation of inaccurate information not substantiated by intelligence agencies, failed to fulfill it. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, officials found that Iraq had virtually ended its nuclear weapon program in 1991 (Kessler).

The 2008 congressional report on the cause of the Iraq war found that, “statements by the president, vice president, secretary of state, and the national security advisor regarding a possible n Iraqi nuclear weapons program..did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community (Kessler).”

The Bush administration concealed and misconstrued information on the intelligence, and only few members of Congress actually read the classified 2002 NIE report which actually contained the dissenting intelligence. Most were informed through the censored version made available to the public which was erased of all dissent to manipulate public opinion.

Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.) — a member of Congress who read the report — later stated that the classified version, “contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy (Kessler).” Skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein’s will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.” 

Subsequently, Congress was led to vote on a war — making a military decision which would impact the utility of nations and hundreds of thousands of lives — based on a sanitized intelligence report that concealed all dissent and suggested Iraq posed an imminent threat with WMDs.

While some analysts did believe Iraq had kept on building up its programs instead of abandoning them after the 1991, Persian War, much dissenting intelligence was hidden from policy makers and the public (Stein). President Bush and his advisors touted intelligence that only supported their policy goals and ignored all of the dissent within the intelligence community for political purposes to build support for the Iraq war.

The Bush administration deliberately fabricated a narrative about what the intelligence actually stated as fact and misled both the public and policy about WMDs and about Saddam Hussein’s and Iraq’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda. Their statements directly caused the Iraq war which claimed over 250,000 lives over the fear of Hussein’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons posing a grave threat to the US and allies which then gained traction in major news outlets such as Time and New York Times.

Bush did not share the NIE report which contained dissenting information within intelligence agencies which did not support the claims by officials like Cheney stating, “there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Policymakers were misled on the NIE’s conclusions. The “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq” released by the Senate on July 9, 2004 concluded that the Bush administration overstated or misconstrued facts and mischaracterized the intelligence to lead the US into war against Iraq (Mazzetti).

It states, “Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.”

Both the Bush administration and intelligence community failed to communicate to policymakers the true NIE’s conclusions, and they succumbed to group think instead of the rational choice which is based on accurate and abundant information. Congress voted for the authorization of the Iraq war 296-133 on October 2, 2002 (History.com). The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 led young men into a $2 trillion war overseas. 

The probability of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, being linked to the 9/11 hijacker and al-Qaeda was manipulated as information was disseminated down from the Bush administration to policy makers, so the rational choice was not made. This directly led to the Iraq war — based on a White House narrative unsubstantiated by intelligence agencies. 

Congress was misled into the Iraq war. At a congressional hearing congressman Walter Jones asked a question about the intelligence manipulation, ““How could the professionals see what was happening and nobody speak out?” To which Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, responded, “The vice president.” Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and other officials deliberately misled Congress about the true intelligence regarding Iraq and nuclear weapons (Stein). Moreover, intelligence operatives did not speak up as the administration cherry-picked and built its argument for war.

Despite Bush being briefed by the intelligence community on September 21, 2001 that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, he launched a war against Iraq. And despite there being no weapons of mass destruction found, Cheney told fear-mongered, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends…and against us (Matthews).”

Both the 2002 and 2008 senate reports demonstrate that the Bush administration manipulated its intelligence and misled Congress and the American people before the U.S. invasion of Iraq (Mazzetti). Congress did not have read the uncensored version of the 2002 NIE report which displayed the strong dissent against the absolute claims officials like Cheney and Bush made.

The rational choice model relies on accurate information being relayed to maximize utility. Within structural realism, the most pivotal priority is the development of a rational choice-based theory of state behavior in response to system structure (Structural Realism and the Causes of War, James). However, the U.S. state behavior was not based on nationality in the case of the Iraq war because the government launched a $2 trillion operation on a false premise that Iraq was connected to 9/11 and that they posed an imminent threat and had obtained weapons of mass destruction. While a state pursuing the rational choice seeks accurate information to increase utility – states seek security and “calculate their interests in terms of their power relative to others in the international system (James).” The White House under Bush built a false imminent threat to rally their cause for war.

Rational actors are thought to be self-interested states concerned with building and maintaining domestic power and external security “and sometimes trading some of the latter in order to gain the former (Owen). However, the threat to security posed by weapons of mass destruction was a false one.
 

The fabricated narrative that Iraq had WMDs and was linked to 9/11 led Congress to vote yes on the invasion. Nevertheless, international relations experts believe the US’s “real motives for attacking Iraq may have been complex, but ‘regime change’ – the replacement of Saddam Hussein’s gruesome tyranny with a democracy – was central to Washington’s rhetoric by the time it began bombing Bagdad in March 2003 (Owen),” The Bush administration pursued the democratic peace theory, and failed because the theory “does not dictate that the United States can or should remake Iraq into a democracy (Owen).”

The “arrogance of power” – when leading nations believe they have the sufficient power to make other states “equally wise, happy, and rich” — is what leads them to pursue this peace theory (Spanier). However, transforming authoritarian countries into democracies is more challenging than they anticipated.

Besides failings in the communication of intelligence, humanity’s propensity for cognitive limits led policymakers and the citizenry alike to support the war despite no evidence of WMDs being presented. People’s heuristics filled in the intelligence gaps and led to direct military action. The hypothetical threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of foreign adversaries influence the state’s behavior to act in the “security” of the nation – or the pursuit of self-interest and utility maximization.

Ultimately, if the accurate and complete information intelligence agencies held had been communicated to policymakers in Congress, instead of the manipulated narrative the Bush administration built, a more rational choice would have likely been made and the U.S. wouldn’t have launched the Iraq war seeing as there did not exist a threat of weapons of mass destruction or link between 9/11 and Iraq. The solution to a possible threat – and the rational choice model — was pursuing more and better information instead of framing selective intelligence to build support for the war and censoring the 2002 NIE’s report containing dissent within the intelligence agencies.

Works Cited

James, Patrick. Structural Realism and the Causes of War – JSTOR. The International Studies Association, Oct. 1995, www.jstor.org/stable/222750.

Kessler, Glenn. “Analysis | The Iraq War and WMDs: An Intelligence Failure or White House Spin?” The Washington Post, WP Company, 22 Mar. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin/.

Matthews, Dylan. “No, Really, George W. Bush Lied about WMDs.” Vox, Vox, 9 July 2016, www.vox.com/2016/7/9/12123022/george-w-bush-lies-iraq-war.

Mazzetti, Mark. “Senate Panel Releases Report on Iraq Intelligence.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/09intelcnd.html.

Mazzetti, Mark, and Scott Shane. “Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 June 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/washington/05cnd-intel.html.

Owen, John. Iraq and the Democratic Peace: Who Says Democracies Don’t Fight – JSTOR Council on Foreign Relations, Nov. – Dec., 2005), pp. 122-127, : https://www.jstor.org/stable/20031781

Schwarz, Jon. “Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago and What He Told the U.N.” The Intercept, 6 Feb. 2018, theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin-powell-knew-about-iraq-fifteen-years-ago-and-what-he-told-the-un/.

Stein, Jonathan, and Tim Dickinson. “Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq.” Mother Jones, 25 June 2017, www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/.

Spanier, John Winston. Games Nations Play: Analyzing International Politics. Praeger, 1976.

Walcott, John, et al. “What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know About Iraq.” POLITICO Magazine, 24 Jan. 2016, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/iraq-war-wmds-donald-rumsfeld-new-report-213530.

“War in Iraq Begins.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 24 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/war-in-iraq-begins.