On this day, 20 March 2003, the Iraq war begins.

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 America history.”