In much of 20, the United States had a difficult and painful internal debate - first among policymakers and then after Bashar al-Assad's August 2013 chemical weapons attack - over what to do about the war devastating Syria. While conditions improved significantly after 2008, not long after the US forces departed in 2011, the country collapsed again into violence. In this period, which lasted two awful years, civilians were often the target of the violence, with bombings and death squads seeking to ethnically cleanse Baghdad in particular. In early 2006, however, Iraq's conflict became what is often described as a civil war, fought among three factions: Sunni insurgents, including Islamist extremists and former Saddam loyalists Shia militias, some of them rogue members of state security forces and the US-led occupation force. Civilians in this period were bystanders. The first, from 2003 to 2005, was the war between the US-led invasion force and Iraqi forces, including government forces as well as Islamist and nationalist insurgents. The fluctuations in this chart show the first three distinct stages of the war. No one has suffered more from the Iraq War - which in some ways is still ongoing - than Iraqi civilians. While this experiment in colonialism was short-lived and controversial at home, it began America's role as a major global power. The US had become a European-style imperial power. The war also ended with the US taking control of three other Spanish possessions: Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, a massive and populous island nation in the Pacific where the US fought a war against independence activists. When the war ended in Spanish defeat, US anti-imperialists blocked the US from annexing Cuba, but pro-imperialists succeeded in passing the notorious Platt Amendment, which placed Cuba under a quasi-imperialist form of indirect control the US base at Guantanamo Bay is a relic of this arrangement. In 1898, Cuban activists launched a war of independence from Spain, and the US intervened on their side. The debate centered on Cuba: pro-imperialists wanted to purchase or annex it from Spain (pre-1861, the plan was to turn it into a new slave state) anti-imperialists wanted to support Cuban independence. The Spanish Empire had been crumbling for a century, and there was a ferocious debate within the US over whether America should replace it as a European-style imperial power, or if as a democracy the US should instead liberate peoples from imperialism. If there was a single moment when the US became a global power, it was the war with Spain.
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