"I was there in Iraq 20 years ago - the invasion left behind violence and chaos"

It opened with a bombardment of "shock and awe" on the palaces of Saddam Hussein, then, 20 years ago today, troops stormed into Iraq in a campaign that the effects continue.

Some 35,000 Britons were among the 200,000 troops deployed by the United States following claims that the tyrant Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Months of protests, led in the UK by the Mirror, had opposed the war, but a dubious intelligence record persuaded Tony Blair's government to back George W Bush's invasion.

The Iraqis in Baghdad told me before the invasion that they did not believe America would dare to attack.

Some of them were veterans of the Republican Guard - the feared and so-called elite corps of Saddam's army.

The front page of the Mirror of January 21, 2003 called on people to oppose the war (

Picture:

DailyMirror)

The front page of the Mirror on January 20, 2003 (

Picture:

DailyMirror)

In reality, they were poverty stricken and had suffered for years under Saddam.

But the neoconservatives in the US government at the time had long had ambitions to replace Saddam's regime.

So after 9/11, they used atrocity, along with distorted and false intelligence, to justify the invasion of Iraq – although the Al Qaeda attack was engineered in Afghanistan .

The resulting war cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

And it was a shocking lesson in how to plant the seeds of insurgency, and then give it space to grow.

On May 1, George W Bush declared combat operations to be over.

Former US diplomat Paul Bremer added to Iraq's humiliation by leading the Coalition Provisional Authority, arrogantly suppressing the country's security network.

Iraq's Sunni-led security apparatus has been dismantled, and police, spies, soldiers, local officials and politicians have been removed from their posts.