Even before he took office, during his campaign for president, George W. Bush made it clear that the deposing of Saddam Hussein was near the top of his foreign policy agenda. He charged that the Clinton administration had allowed the sanctions against Iraq to weaken and that it had not been aggressive enough in providing support to pro-U.S. forces within Iraq. Once elected, but before taking office, Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He spent more than half of the meeting talking about Iraq. Later, he would describe Saddam Hussein as "a guy who tried to kill my dad."

His administration included several members, such as Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had been lobbying for years for the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. But it was only after the September 11th terrorist attacks and the subsequent routing of the Taliban from Afghanistan, that President Bush turned his full focus to Saddam Hussein.

In his much-discussed "axis of evil" speech in January 2002, Bush went public with his notion that it was time to begin concentrating on governments that support terrorist groups. At the top of his "axis of evil" list was Iraq. By summer the president was suggesting that the United States was prepared to stage a pre-emptive strike against Iraq to prevent Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction. That unilateral stance prompted howls of protest from most of America's allies, particularly in the Middle East, who argued that it was up to the U. N., not George Bush, to decide how to deal with Hussein as a threat to world peace.

By September, President Bush had scaled back his saber-rattling, but in a speech before the U.N. he issued a challenge to the international organization to enforce the resolution Hussein had agreed to after the Gulf War. If it wasn't prepared to get tough with Hussein, the United States was ready to act on its own, he declared. The president also implied that even if Hussein complied with resolutions, the U.N. should "open the prospect" of building a new government in Iraq — one obviously without Saddam Hussein.

Bush was able to get unanimous support of the U.N. Security Council for a resolution mandating that Iraq disarm itself of weapons of mass destruction and allow U.N. inspectors back into the country. Soon thereafter, inspectors returned to Iraq to search for evidence of the biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. They reported some progress, but to the Bush White House, Saddam Hussein was again toying with the inspectors and avoiding any semblance of full disclosure. President Bush began ordering American troops to Kuwait, while lobbying, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.N. Security Council members to support a new resolution calling for military action against Hussein's regime. But by late February, 2003, when it became clear that the Security Council wouldn't pass the resolution, the U.S. and Great Britain decided to move against Hussein without U.N. support. On March 17, 2003, President Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq. Two days later bombs began falling again on Baghdad.