After months of diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations, a US-led coalition began bombing Baghdad and pushed ground troops across the Kuwaiti border, launching the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein within three weeks. The war, justified by claims of weapons of mass destruction never found, led to a prolonged insurgency, sectarian violence, and roughly two decades of American military presence in Iraq.
President George W. Bush announced the start of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in a televised address, declaring that coalition forces were engaged in "strikes of opportunity" against Iraqi leadership targets even before the full ground campaign began. Cruise missiles and precision bombs struck Baghdad in the opening hours, a spectacle broadcast live on cable news as tracer fire lit the night sky over the Tigris.
Within days, tens of thousands of American and British troops pushed north from Kuwait, encountering fierce but disorganized resistance. Baghdad fell on April 9, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square became an instant, if misleading, symbol of victory.
The stated justification—Iraq's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction—collapsed under postwar inspections that found none. What followed was not the quick, welcomed liberation the Bush administration promised but a brutal insurgency, sectarian civil war, and the eventual rise of ISIS, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, reshaping American foreign policy for a generation.