Your time line is off badly.
The war began in 1991 and was prosecuted daily by Bill Clinton from air bases in Saudi Arabia.
The invasion in 2003 was an escalation, not a beginning. The escalation was because Saddam did not comply with UN resolutions and violated sanctions.
If you were to be brutally honest, the “war” actually started well over a thousand years ago...this is just an inevitable continuation, and possibly conclusion, of the Ottoman empire.
“the war began in 1991”
Depends on which war you mean. I’m talking about the Wahabi-Deobandi war on America whose first engagement was on 9/11/01.
The conflict with Saddam does go back to 1991, and he WAS parading around with a big “kick me” sign after 9/11, but as far as his “defiance of UN resolutions”, that’s a point in his favor as far as I’m concerned. Anybody who swims across the river of sh*t that comes out of Turtle Bay can’t be all bad.
And yes, you can date the war to 1688, or 1453, or even to the Hegira, but wars have to have an axis of attack and the enemy a center of gravity.
In the war that started in 2001, the axis of attack runs through Riyadh and Islamabad, and the enemy center of gravity is Wahabi Islam and its Deobandi cousin in Pakistan.
If Bush had asked Congress for 90 divisions with appropriate air and sea support on 9/16/01 as he should have done, he would have gotten them.