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"Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

George W. Bush became a wartime president on September 11, 2001 — and made the consequential decision to expand the response to Afghanistan into a global 'War on Terror' that included Iraq. His decision to invade Iraq was rooted in a genuine belief in the WMD intelligence he was presented, a conviction that deposing Saddam would transform the Middle East into a democracy, and the influence of neoconservative advisors. The intelligence turned out to be wrong, the democratic transformation did not happen, and the occupation descended into sectarian civil war. His decision to authorize the 'surge' in 2007 — adding 30,000 troops and changing strategy under Gen. Petraeus — stabilized Iraq after years of catastrophe. He left office with approval ratings below 30%. His memoir, 'Decision Points,' offers a candid account of his reasoning without abandoning the decisions themselves.

"Tell me how this ends."

David Petraeus was arguably the most intellectually impressive American general of his generation — a Princeton PhD who had written his dissertation on the lessons of Vietnam, a marathon runner who led PT runs at punishing pace, and a commander who understood that counterinsurgency required understanding populations as much as defeating enemies. He commanded the 101st Airborne in the 2003 invasion and northern Iraq afterward, running what many analysts considered the most effective occupation in the country. He then co-authored FM 3-24, the Army-Marine counterinsurgency manual. When Bush chose him to command the surge in 2007, Petraeus implemented a fundamentally different strategy: move troops out of large bases and into neighborhoods, work with former insurgents (the 'Awakening' movement), and protect the population rather than just killing insurgents. Violence dropped dramatically. He later resigned as CIA Director in 2012 after pleading guilty to mishandling classified information shared with his biographer.

"We got him."

L. Paul 'Jerry' Bremer III was the US viceroy in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004. His two most consequential decisions defined the occupation's failure. Order 1 — de-Baathification — removed from government employment roughly 85,000 people, including teachers, engineers, and civil servants who had joined the party for career reasons, not ideology. Order 2 — dissolving the Iraqi Army — put 400,000 trained soldiers, with weapons and grievances, out of work overnight. Both orders created tens of thousands of people with military skills and nothing to lose who joined the insurgency. Bremer later claimed both decisions were approved by Washington; Rumsfeld claimed they were Bremer's alone. The dispute was never resolved. He left 14 months later, handing the Interim Government to Iyad Allawi on June 28, 2004 — two days early to confound insurgent attacks.

"The Shia are the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy."

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the most destructive individual figure of the Iraq War — a Jordanian street criminal turned jihadist who transformed a US military occupation problem into a sectarian apocalypse. Born Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh in Zarqa, Jordan, he was a high school dropout, street criminal, and petty thug before becoming radicalized in prison. He went to Afghanistan in the 1980s and built his own jihadist network, separate from bin Laden's al-Qaeda. After 9/11, he made his way to Iraq before the US invasion, positioning himself to exploit the chaos that followed. His organization murdered UN envoys, bombed Shia shrines, and executed hostages on video. His most consequential strategic choice was targeting Iraqi Shia Muslims to provoke a civil war, correctly calculating that a Sunni-Shia bloodbath would make American occupation impossible. He was killed by two 500-pound bombs in a US airstrike near Baqubah on June 7, 2006 — but the organization he built survived him and became ISIS.

"It will be hard to start another war. Everyone can see what happens."

Colin Powell was the most credible American official to make the case for the Iraq War — and the one who most regretted having done so. His February 5, 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council, with satellite imagery of alleged Iraqi WMD facilities, Secretary-General Annan at his side, and the collected ambassadors of the world watching, was the defining moment of the pre-war diplomatic effort. His personal credibility — as the Black son of Jamaican immigrants who had risen to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — was deployed to sell a war he had privately doubted. He had told Bush that if he went into Iraq he would own it: 'You break it, you own it.' Bush went in anyway. The WMDs were never found. Powell called the UN speech 'a blot' on his record that would follow him forever. He resigned after the 2004 election and spent his remaining years trying to rehabilitate his reputation. He died of COVID-19 complications in 2021, immunocompromised by a blood cancer that his aides had not disclosed.

"I am Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate."

Saddam Hussein was one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century — a Baathist revolutionary who seized power through violence, held it through terror, and miscalculated catastrophically three times: invading Iran in 1980, invading Kuwait in 1990, and allowing the world to believe he still possessed WMDs in 2002. His calculated ambiguity about WMDs — meant to deter Iran — ultimately provided the justification for his own overthrow. Saddam ruled through a system of genuine loyalty (Sunni Arab tribesmen from Tikrit), institutionalized fear (the secret police), and selective generosity (patronage networks). He used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, killing thousands. After 1991's Gulf War defeat, he played cat-and-mouse with UN weapons inspectors for a decade. He was captured in December 2003, tried by an Iraqi tribunal, convicted of crimes against humanity for the 1982 Dujail massacre, and hanged on December 30, 2006 — at dawn, Sunni Islam's Eid al-Adha — in a chaotic execution filmed on a cell phone and leaked worldwide.

"No to colonialism, no to the devil, no to America, no to Israel!"

Muqtada al-Sadr was the Iraqi politician American planners most consistently underestimated. The son of a revered Shia cleric murdered by Saddam, he had enormous street-level credibility in Iraq's Shia underclass — particularly in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum named after his father. He organized the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi, or JAM) within weeks of the 2003 invasion, exploiting the power vacuum in Shia areas. His forces controlled Sadr City — 2.5 million people — and significant portions of Basra, Najaf, and other southern cities. He twice led uprisings against US forces (2004 and 2008), each time accepting ceasefires when militarily pressured while preserving his political position. He survived the Iraq War to become one of the most powerful political figures in post-occupation Iraq, wielding his parliamentary bloc to determine which governments could be formed.

"If a political bloc wins and forms the government, it should form it. It is not possible for parties that lost the elections to seek to bring down the government."

Nouri al-Maliki was the American solution to the Iraq crisis of 2006 — a Shia Islamist with no obvious ties to Iran who seemed capable of leading a unity government. He proved capable of some things: he ordered the Basra operation in 2008 that confronted Sadr's Mahdi Army, and he agreed to the Status of Forces Agreement that structured the US withdrawal. But his sectarian instincts, shaped by decades of Baathist persecution, led him to marginalize Sunni political partners, purge the security forces of effective Sunni officers, and govern in a manner that recreated the exact conditions of Sunni alienation that the surge had suppressed. By 2013, Sunni communities across western Iraq were in open revolt again. In 2014, when ISIS swept through Mosul, the Iraqi Army Maliki had built — riddled with ghost soldiers, incompetent officers, and no esprit de corps — collapsed in hours. He resigned in August 2014.