Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush landed in a twin-engine Navy jet on an aircraft carrier, strode across the deck in a bulky flight suit and proceeded to give a televised victory speech under a huge red-white-and-blue banner announcing "Mission Accomplished." For Bush, the optics on May 1, 2003 could hardly have been more triumphant. From the USS Abraham Lincoln, 30 miles off the coast of San Diego, he delivered a stirring coda, proclaiming that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" just six weeks after the United States led the invasion of that country.
But Bush's jubilant claim unraveled as combat escalated between Iraqi insurgents and occupying forces. During the next nine years, the American death toll went from 172, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, to more than 4,400, while the deaths of Iraqi people surged into the hundreds of thousands. The physical wounds were even more numerous, the emotional injuries incalculable.
