President George W. Bush meets with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld outside the Oval Office shortly after authorizing "Operation Iraqi Freedom", March 19, 2003. In the annals of modern history, few events have had such a profound and far-reaching impact as the Iraq War. Initiated under the Bush administration in 2003, the invasion of Iraq was justified by a narrative that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and posed an imminent threat.