I flew home from a Boston writing conference this afternoon. The skies were cloudless and blue. Earth looked so serene from 33,000 feet up.

In the world’s busiest airport, there was not a trace of the wars that are now history for the United States. No more soldiers returning home from bloody tours of duty; no more family reunions that would make the hardest and most cynical of us cry. None of those scenes that had at one time become unsettlingly familiar.

Exactly 20 years ago today, George Bush declared war on Iraq. America was intent on driving out Saddam Hussein, intent on ending tyrannical rule under which countless Iraqis had suffered. Yet what followed was chaos and utter ruination of a nation that was once considered one of the Middle East’s finest. No lessons learned from the past, the United States showed the same bluster and folly in the dusty dunes of Iraq as it had in the Vietnamese jungles and rice paddies of the Mekong.

For a moment, when I arrived in Baghdad a few weeks after the invasion, Iraq was buoyed by elation – and hope that maybe, finally, people would prosper peacefully. But those precious moments between the fall of Saddam and the subsequent American occupation were short-lived. Iraq would descend into hell.

Few Americans stopped to remember Iraq today, the 20^th anniversary of the invasion. What does it matter anyway? A milestone day? An anniversary? Such dates are not necessary for Iraqis whose lives were forever changed by American miscalculations. So many dead. So many, maimed. So many families torn apart. And a nation still struggling to establish democracy and peace for all.

Here is a story I wrote for CNN on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War: Iraq’s Baby Noor: an unfinished miracle