In May 2003, George W Bush landed on the deck of a US aircraft carrier to deliver a triumphant speech, declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended – six weeks after he had ordered US troops to invade the country. Bush spoke under a now infamous banner on the carrier’s bridge that proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished”. It would turn into a case study of American hubris and one of the most mocked photo-ops in modern history.
As Bush made his speech off the coast of San Diego, I was in Baghdad covering the invasion’s aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It was clear then that the war was far from over, and the US was likely to face a grinding insurgency led by former members of the Iraqi security forces. It would also soon become clear that Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not intent on developing them. And Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, despite the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to connect Hussein’s regime to al-Qaida.
