Did it work? Iraq 20 years after the US invasion

Reading Time: 11 minutes

March 20 marks two decades since the beginning of the US-led invasion of Iraq. In those 20 years, it has become de rigueur to malign the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the attempt to build a free and prosperous Iraq. Such critics often tell us that the intervention was always going to fail and that this failure was utterly foreseeable, that nothing but catastrophe could come of invading. But ‘catastrophic’ is too mild a word to describe the state of Iraq since 2003.