• Over a million dead Iraqi civilians, so to our bloodthirsty warmongering government officials who can only get off if they’re looking at pictures of dead people, it was a massive success.

• Lot of public money delivered to private corporations via the war and all it took was laundering that money through human blood, but they were just Middle Easterners and didn’t count, so to the corrupt and venal fucks who started the war, yes, massive success.

• Destroyed a relatively stable country in the middle east, started ISIS, destabilized the entire region, weakened neighboring countries with that destabilization, so yes, it was a massive success.

I take issue with billing Iraq as the “dumb war” because it opens up the exact line of inquiry you are making, which misses the point. It opens the war up to questions or defense that it was “effective” at achieving its goals and then says “well, those dopey Americans are so incompetent that they failed to achieve their goals!” Not saying you’d do that, but libs and conservatives are eager to rehabilitate the war and downplay how bad it was. Better to call it a mistake, and then say “actually it worked out for our interests so it wasn’t such a mistake”, than to look at the actual problem with the war.

The problem with the war is not that it was a “failure”. The problem is that it murdered a fuckton of people… The Iraq War is the most dramatic crime against humanity the US had committed this century until it helped Israel massively accelerate and intensify the genocide in Palestine.

Many years ago I was friends with a conservative who told me she’d learned at school that I was right when I said the soldiers don’t fight for our freedom. Her professors at her super rich elite private conservative college had explained to her that the army does not fight for our freedom, it fights for our way of life. Our way of life that requires economic power imbalances in our favor, which requires keeping other regions of the world destabilized, weak, and dependent on making favorable deals with the US.

The Iraq War did not achieve its maximalist goals of smoothly installing a puppet regime that would turn Iraq into a vassal state ripe for economic exploitation under the guise of “rebuilding” and “foreign development”, but it did achieve its minimal goals of sowing chaos.

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).

As a result, the US now controls all of Iraq’s oil revenue until the end of time. The UN mandate for this expired in 2011, but the US simply ignored it.

The US can effectively shut down Iraq whenever they want by withholding the funds.

https://thecradle.co/articles/why-does-the-us-still-control-every-penny-of-iraqi-oil-revenues

From what I know the country was in constant civil strife until the joint defeat of ISIS by the Iraqi Army, Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the YPG.

That being the start of a more stable period in the country. Notably with US involvement being secondary to those armed groups’.

It’s a mixed bag from the imperialist POV:

1. They got rid of Saddam, but Saddam was also a soft check in Iranian influence. Besides hostility towards Iran, Saddam also had a rivalry with the Assad family. Would Hezbollah have been able to get arms from Iran if Saddam was still around?

2. They took a big hit in prestige and PR. Perhaps this doesn’t count for much in the grand scheme of things.

Actual imperialist success stories are Yugoslavia, Libya, and Panama. The US more or less got everything they set out to accomplish while looking like the world’s saviors.

Its hard to say what its actual goals were - nominally, it was about Saddam giving up any WMD. Notwithstanding he didnt actually have any… then it was about freedom and democracy in the middle east, I guess, and winning hearts and minds. Hard to say if that succeeded.

Theres speculated goals, like petro-dollar recycling. Iraq had made moves to trade oil in euros and yuan in the 00s instead of having deals based on US dollars. One of the only ministries that were protected during the Iraq war was the oil ministry. Not even the UN buildings had any protection. Cheney made a lot of money on rebuilding contracts.

It definitely failed in halting Iranian influence in Iraq or the region. It didnt really stop terrorism, ISIS emerged out of it.

it creatred ISIS so I’d say yes

I mean Holden bloodfeast no doubt thinks it was a success so there’s that?