Timeline

2001

September 11 – The World Trade Center is hit by two hijacked planes. This event is now commonly referred to as the “September Eleventh Terrorist Attacks” or “9/11″ and it caused a lot of hurt, fear, and anger for many Americans. President Bush used those emotions to garner support for the War on Terror and cited the events of September 11th as a main cause to initiate the GWOT (Global War on Terror). Osama Bin Laden is named the primary suspect for the mastermind of these attacks.


September 20 – President Bush addresses Congress
October 7 – President Bush sends troops into Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom to try to clear out the Taliban Regime which supports al Qaeda forces.

October 8 – The new office of Homeland Security is created
November 19 – The Transportation Security Administration is established

2002

May – Operation Southern Focus begins. According to Buzzle.com, 606 precision-guided bombs were dropped on 391 targets to attempt to destroy Saddam Hussein’s air defenses.

May 18 – The press discovers details of the President’s August 6th, 2001 briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” as well as other pre-9/11 memos indicating some prior knowledge of possible terror attacks in the United States.
July 23 – The Downing Street Memo is written. Here is a short excerpt of the memo:

There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

August 1 – A Justice Dept memo states that torture only includes physical pain so great that it leads to “death [or] organ failure,” and that the criminal law prohibiting torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations of enemy combatants pursuant to the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers.”
August 26 – Vice President Cheney is quoted as saying:

“Simply stated, 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, against our allies, and against us.”

November 14 – Donald Rumsfeld, how long do you think think the war will last?

“Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that. It won’t be a World War III.”

November 27 – Donald Rumsfeld signs off on a memo that recategorized ‘legal’ interrogation techniques:

“Category 3: Use of scenarios to persuade the detainee that death or pain is imminent for him or his family, exposure to cold or water, use of mild non-injurious physical contact, use of a wet towel or water-boarding to simulate drowning or suffocation”

November 25 – The Department of Homeland Security is established
(United States troops are still deployed in Afghanistan)

2003

January 27 – A UN press release states that after 60 of inspection at 106 locations, UN weapons inspectors found “no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program.”
March 1 – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11th attacks, is arrested in Pakistan
March 17 – Operation Liberty Shield begins. Although its name is misleading, this is not a war movement. Rather, it is a new body of policies from the Department of Homeland Security that promote increased ‘Homeland Security’ in this time of war. The same day, the “coalition of the willing,” consisting of the United States, Britain, and Spain, announced it will enforce the U.N. resolution without the U.N.’s approval.

March 19 – Operation Iraqi Freedom begins. Its objectives are “freeing” the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s regime and finding and removing Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s).
April 2 – The House grants $79 billion to the war in Iraq.
May 1 – President Bush declares an end to major combat in Iraq aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a large “Mission Accomplished” banner. The Terrorist Threat Integration Center was also opened on May 1.

June 24 – $29.4 billion is granted by the House for Homeland Security
July 22 – Uday and Qusai, Saddam Hussein’s sons, are killed by U.S. forces
November 6 – $87 billion is appropriated for the war by President Bush
December 14 - Saddam Hussein is captured and arrested in Iraq.

2004

January 28 – “It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing,” Daniel Kay, Iraq Survey Group Inspector.
March 5 – Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector declares that the war in Iraq was illegal.
April 28 – Images of torture at Abu Ghiraib are released.

August 30 – “Had we had to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success–being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day,” President George W. Bush
October 7 – “Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them,” CIA Duelfer Report
December 8 – “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

2005

January 12 – The U.S. investigators’ search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ends.
May 11 – $76B is allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a supplemental spending bill
September 9 – “I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now,” Colin Powell on his pre-war speech to the UN

November 8 – Rumors spread that U.S. troops may have used chemical weapons during the November 2004 assault on Fallujah.
November 30 – The White House reveals its strategy for Victory in Iraq.
December 18 – “Much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” President Bush

2006

February 3 – President Bush requests an additional $120B to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2006.
June 8 – Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is killed in a U.S. air raid.
Jund 20 – “We envisage the U.S. troop presence by year’s end to be under 100,000, with most of the remaining troops to return home by the end of 2007,” Iraqi National Security Adviser
August 19 – The war in Iraq surpasses WWII in length at 1,249 days.

August 30 – HITLER REFERENCE #1, Donald Rumsfeld compared critics of his policies to people “in the decades before World War II” who believed Hitler “could be appeased” and “argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated — or that it was someone else’s problem.”
October 12 – A Fox News opinion poll finds 73% of Americans support withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
October 16 – CNN finds 61% of Americans now disapprove of Bush’s handling of his job as President
November 5 – Saddam Hussein is sentenced to be executed, by way of hanging.
November 8 – Donald Rumsfeld resigns from his position as Secretary of Defense

November 16 – Bush tells his senior advisers that he plans to send 20,000 additional troops into Iraq. 5 days later (November 21), an Iraqi opinion poll shows over 70% of the Shia population and over 90% of the Sunni population want U.S. troops to withdraw within a year.
November 29 – A new poll shows 68% of Americans believe Iraq is engaged in civil war. However, two days later (December 1), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice falsely claims that most Iraqis do not believe they are engaged in civil war.

December 6 – The Iraq Study Group Report is released. Robert Gates was also confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense.
December 19 – According to a CNN poll, only 11% support the Bush Administration’s proposed plan to escalate the war in Iraq by deploying at least 20,000 additional troops.
December 26 – The American death toll in Iraq reaches 2,977 and surpasses that of the September 11th attacks.

2007

January 5 – 33 United States Senators admit that they were wrong to vote for the war in Iraq.
January 13 – “I’m Sending More Troops To Iraq No Matter What Congress Does,” George Bush, President of the United States of America
February 16 – The United States House of Representatives voted to oppose the escalation of troops in Iraq.
February 22 – British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announces plans to withdraw his troops from Iraq.

February 26 – HITLER REFERENCE #2, “If Congress were now to revise the Iraq authorization, it would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change, then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
March 12 – The number of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq reaches 2,195