Its been written down in history as a gigantic failure; this era’s Vietnam. But as far as post WWII US invasions go, it met its goals in the end. Even if it tanked the reputations of everyone involved. A flat tax and foreign private interest rights remain ensrined in the Iraqi constitution. And its just democratic enough to earnestly tell the US to fuck off but not sovereign enough to ever make them.
This is strictly in comparison to other US invasions. Compared to Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan its was an actual - if only marginal - success. You have to reach into all the minor, “light touch”, interventions to find something more successful.
Anyways I’m not trying to be like “the Iraq War was good, actually”. Its just had this reputation of being the “dumb war” compared to Afghanistan. But after the US flat out gave Afghanistan back to the Taliban, we should reevaluate its position in US interventions and recognize how many are total abject failures.
It was a success for the empire.
Not a total success at least yet but the government is unwilling to wage war to throw them out. They have basically permanent occupation status in a key area in the crossroads of humanity they are determined to control to block the path of China, Russia, Iran from trading, projecting power through the region, etc.
In the same way Syria is a success in that they have destabilized it, have a comprador government in place, etc.
In terms of grand geopolitical strategy it is a win for the US. Not a total win, not an all conditions sought by them satisfied win. In terms of what the neo-cons may have had fever dreams of it didn’t go that far but they’re entrenched and along with their gulf puppets (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, etc) basically have locked down the region with Syria’s fall only adding to that and them opening up a desire to occupy a stretch of Armenia on the border of Iran only solidifying it as a key area for their interests and control going forward.
They haven’t lost spectacularly like in Vietnam where they were thrown out and chased out on the last helicopter from their embassy, it wasn’t a partial loss like Korea where they had to sign an armistice and take only half of what they wanted. They effectively won and operate as they like from there subject to some appeasement and wrangling with the needs for appearances being kept up for their comprador/impotent installed government.
I’ll bang on again about “The Grand Chessboard” by Brzezinski, a top empire ghoul which was published in the aftermath of the cold war at the end of last century. There’s a passage in there about a triangle of control, a region that must be controlled, denied to other powers, destabilized, etc in order to prevent European, Asian (Chinese), Russian, and African land power and trade from uniting and locking the US out an ocean away. It’s still an imperative for the US and they’ve played their chessboard pretty well so far. China has no meaningful inroads because compradors obey their masters regardless of trade or actual interests of their people and nation. Russia has lost influence because of the same compradors, EU propaganda pushes, color revolutions in central Asia, back-door plotting in central Asia and the open move to depose Assad which took a decade but paid off. Iran is the final impediment and slated for destabilization or at least crippling isolation (the zionists want to install a puppet regime, the US is more dubious of the advisability of that compared to simply plunging the country into internal strife like Syria before getting some compradors who while not exactly rabid zionists would be pliant enough).