Smoke rises from the Trade Ministry in Baghdad on March 20, 2003, after it was hit by a missile during US-led attacks.
Sunday marks 20 years since American and coalition forces invaded Iraq on a mission to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and find weapons of mass destruction.
Former President George W. Bush and his administration wagered to the American public and the international community that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The coalition found no such weapons, and two years later the WMD Commission, established by Bush, acknowledged in a report that the "WMD" fiasco was “one of the most public – and most damaging – intelligence failures in recent American history.”
Forces did succeed in knocking Hussein out of power, clearing the way for a fraught nation-building project that would stretch for nearly a decade.
Bush and supporters of the war would go on to admit the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, but maintain the world would've been "a lot worse off" had Hussein remained in power.
The Iraq War in photos
President Bush, center, flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney, left, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, D-Ill., right, acknowledges applause in the House Chamber of the Capitol during Bush's State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 29, 2002, in Washington. Bush opened by saying, "As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger."
"This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world," Bush said. "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil … The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
In this Feb. 5, 2003 file photo, Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial he said could contain anthrax as he presents evidence of Iraq's alleged weapons programs to the United Nations Security Council.
The speech helped swing the U.S. public in favor of the war. Powell, who died in 2021, would go on to regret the speech.
“I will always regret it," Powell said in an interview with The Harvard Gazette five years later. "It was a terrible mistake on all our parts and on the intelligence community … I wish it had been different. "
Several thousand people march down 16th Street on March 8, 2003 to the White House in Washington to protest the Bush administration's war plan on Iraq. The surprisingly balmy weather had several thousand people chanting and cheering at a rally before their planned march to the Ellipse just south of the White House. The event was organized by the group calling itself CodePink, the name a protest against the governments color-coded terror alert system.
As the war grew imminent, thousands of protesters in the United States and around the globe demonstrated.
Employees and customers at the Township Grille in Matthews, N.C., watch as President Bush announces the beginning of U.S.-led military action in Iraq late on the evening of March 19, 2003.
Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad on March 21, 2003 during a massive US-led air raid on the Iraqi capital. Smoke billowed from a number of targeted sites, including one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, an AFP correspondent said.
U.S. airstrikes pummeled Iraq to clear the way for invading troops.
U.S. Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines wear their gas masks on March 21, 2003 as they prepare to advance towards Iraq.
An Iraqi woman screams upon arriving with her wounded husband and son at al-Kindi hospital in this April 8, 2003 file photo, in Baghdad.
Razzaq Kazem al-Khafaj grieves over the body of his mother in Hilla in the southern province of Babylon on April 1, 2003. Khafaj lost 15 members of his family including six children, as his car was bombed by coalition helicopters while fleeing al-Haidariyeh towards Babylon. Thirty-three civilians were killed and 310 wounded in a U.S.-British coalition bombing of the residential area of Nader south of the city of Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad.
In this April 9, 2003 photo, an Iraqi man, bottom right, watches Cpl. Edward Chin of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines Regiment, cover the face of a statue of Saddam Hussein with an American flag before toppling the statue in downtown in Baghdad, Iraq.
After three weeks of combat, American troops took Baghdad, Iraq's capital, and toppled the statue of Hussein, symbolically ending his reign.
President Bush flashes a "thumbs-up" after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast, in this May 1, 2003 file photo.
In May 2003, Bush declared "mission accomplished," but the war would drag on for years as sectarian violence and insurgency engulfed the country.
A US soldier from the 1st Brigade of 4th Infantry Division on Dec. 15, 2003 gets ready to enter the hole where toppled dictator Saddam Hussein was captured in Ad Dawr. Two days earlier, Hussein was captured there in the hole under a small hut, near his hometown of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad.
Hussein was captured by American forces in December 2003. He would be tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity. He was executed in 2006.
Rows of boxes shaped like coffins, draped with flags representing American soldiers killed in Iraq are carried by demonstrators marching during an anti-Bush protest in New York City on Aug. 29, 2004, the eve of the Republican National Convention.
The U.S. saw protests throughout the war.
U.S. Marines, no names available, grieve during a memorial service for 31 U.S. servicemen at Camp Korean Village, near Ar Rutbah, western Iraq, on Feb. 2, 2005. Thirty Marines and one sailor died on Jan. 26, 2005 when their helicopter crashed near Ar Rutbah while conducting security operations.
A photo of fallen U.S. soldier, Sgt. Jerry Lee Bonifacio Jr., from Bravo Company, 1-184 assigned to TF 4-64, 3rd Infantry Division, sits between the boots of soldiers standing at attention during a memorial service at US army base FOB Prosperity, in central Baghdad on Oct. 13, 2005.
Army 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, Baker Company PFC Jonathan Burton of Louisville, Kentucky, patrols in the mahallah (neighborhood) of Toma on the outskirts of Baghdad at the corner where on June 28, 2007, a Baker Company patrol was hit by an IED in Toma and five soldiers were killed along with 13 wounded.
Army 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, Baker Company soldiers patrol in the mahallah (neighborhood) of Toma on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Mary McHugh mourns her slain fiance Sgt. James Regan at "Section 60" of the Arlington National Cemetery May 27, 2007. Regan, a U.S. Army Ranger, was killed by an IED explosion in Iraq in February2007, and this was the first time McHugh had visited the grave since the funeral. Section 60 is the resting place for many U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A kiosk owner attaches a magazine fronted with the images of the front-runners in the U.S. elections in central Baghdad, on Nov. 04, 2008.
A U.S soldier in Baghdad, Iraq, watches U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on television on Nov. 5, 2008.
President Barack Obama, elected in 2008, promised to withdraw troops from Iraq.
A picture taken on May 15, 2011 shows U.S. troops standing to attention in front of U.S. and Iraqi flags during a handover ceremony near the northern Iraqi town of Hawija. President Barack Obama announced on October 21, 2011 that he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of the year.
The last vehicles in a convoy of the U.S. Army's 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division cross the border from Iraq into Kuwait, on Dec. 18, 2011. The brigade's special troops battalion were the last American soldiers to leave Iraq.
The U.S. completed its withdrawal from the country in December 2011, leaving security in the hands of the Iraqi government.
Major conflict and violence would continue to rack the country. A fledging terrorist group, ISIS, would famously emerge and conquer parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria in the mid-2010s.
