23 years ago: The world said no to war in Iraq

Protesters pack London's Whitehall on Feb. 15, 2003, during a march to Hyde Park to demonstrate against the buildup to the eventual war in Iraq.

Millions of people took to the streets on this day in 2003, demanding an alternative to war.

In one of the largest anti-war protests in human history, cities around the world saw massive demonstrations against the United States’ march to war in Iraq.

The protests came just over a week after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council, presenting an erroneous intelligence case that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. 

Powell and the Bush administration asserted that Iraq was concealing these weapons—a claim that never bore out.

Many of the principal architects of the Iraq War have since died, but their devastating legacy of hubris and not listening to the public endures. Donald Trump, who rose to the top of the GOP by positioning himself as an isolationist and critic of neoconservative interventionism, has since embraced a similar brand of Bush-era regime change politics—albeit with zero diplomacy.

The Iraq War, which began a few weeks after the Feb. 13 protests, would last almost nine years and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.