Introduzione

[Autom. eng. transl.] On the night between 9 and 10 March 2003, the international coalition led by the United States of America launched a massive offensive against Iraq. The fear that Baghdad could count on an active weapons of mass destruction program and was in direct contact with the jihadist organization al-Qa'ida were crucial in sanctioning the launch of the "Iraqi Freedom" operation. In a context still heavily marked by the vivid memory of the attacks of 11 September 2001, the accusations made against the Bathista regime were sufficient to overcome the opposition of a large part of the international community and push Washington to start military operations, despite in the absence of a United Nations Security Council resolution formally authorizing the intervention. Between 2002 and 2003, however, the time factor appeared decisive and the Bush administration proved inflexible in wanting to eliminate at the root a threat considered fatal, even at the cost of breaking the apparent unity of an international assembly that only a few months earlier he stood united in support of the offensive launched against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. As established by the investigation conducted by Sir John Anthony Chilcot on behalf of the British government as well as by the press and by some of the protagonists of the political scene of the time, the entire accusatory system elaborated by the Bush administration would prove to be unfounded and built on the basis of intelligence information that is clearly incorrect or distorted. A dark page in recent history that has ended up indelibly staining the image of Washington and much of the Western world in the eyes of entire populations within the Middle Eastern region and beyond. Yet, Iraqi Freedom was not just this. If from the beginning the desire to put an end to the threat that Saddam posed to the United States and their allies represented a central part of the motivations, equally important was the desire to achieve a regime change capable of modifying the fate of the land of two rivers and the entire Middle Eastern arc.