On the evening of March 19, 2003, then-U.S. President George W. Bush addressed the American people in a live broadcast from the Oval Office. “My fellow citizens,” he opened, “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.”
Those words marked the beginning of the Iraq War—one of the United States’ “forever wars” that continues, in one form or another, to this day. At the time, Bush led the United States to believe that a campaign of “shock and awe” would bring the Iraq War to a swift conclusion. But after eight years of fighting, thousands of service member deaths, and an unknown number of civilian casualties, the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens have come to regard the Iraq War as a grave foreign-policy mistake. Although the war formally ended almost a decade ago, the congressional act that sanctioned it—the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—remains on the books and is subject to continued misuse. Today, on the 18th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we call for the 2002 AUMF to be repealed.
