On March 20, 2003, what was officially one of America's shorter wars began with an airstrike on Saddam Hussein's presidential palace in Baghdad. U.S. armed forces, 160,000 strong, moved out of Kuwait and across Iraq, and after overcoming a few small roadblocks along the way took the capital city within three weeks. On May 1, President George W. Bush declared victory from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of San Diego. With combat over, "our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country," Bush said. "In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world."

As it turned out, neither the U.S. military mission nor the broader cause of liberty and peace were accomplished by May 2003, nor were they in the months and years to follow. What the Bush administration sold as a grim but necessary surgical strike for democracy and stability in the Middle East and the world has been revealed over the past two decades as one of the most grievous errors in superpower history. Mendacious in its beginnings, incompetent in its aftermath, and downright criminal in the death and civilizational wreckage it caused, the Iraq War was a catastrophe America has not yet properly reckoned with.