Not 100% sure that I agree with your point about Iraq, but I'm not saying I completely disagree either.

You're absolutely correct to call out that Iraq is not the abject failure - from the perspective of US leadership - that people often describe it as. This is one of those difficult conversations to have around a lot of well intentioned but thoughtless leftists who will go off on a hair trigger as if this means you somehow think Iraq was either a good thing, or a good decision. It was neither. But, strategically speaking, it was broadly a success. As you say, the US wanted to a) remove Saddam from power, b) establish a friendly satellite government, and c) gain access to the country's oil reserves, and they achieved all three of those goals.

I guess where I would differ is that while they achieved those short-term goals, I think it can be strongly argued that none of those goals adequately served the US' long term geopolitical interests. In that sense, I think that Iraq can still be considered a strategic misstep, even though they accomplished their immediate objectives. First, obviously, the cost they paid for those objectives was arguably far too high. I don't think the US actually meaningfully benefited from any of those goals to a degree that made it worth the lives, money, political capital, and damage to their global trust, reputation and moral standing. And I think that the destabilizing impact on the region and the galvanization of nascent movements like ISIL were pretty much inevitable.

I would tend to argue that the US could have done far more to further their geopolitical interests in the region by not choosing to invade, so in that sense I'd still consider it a poor strategic decision (and this is, of course, putting aside any question of the moral dimensions, on which it was obviously horrific), even though they were, in the limited sense you describe, successful.

I also do want to note that I think there's a sense in which Jhex is actually correct about Iraq; while the US did succeed, operationally, in achieving their strategic goals, Iraq also demonstrated some long-standing issues with the US military that have only worsened with time. Something that's not talked about enough in regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan is that there were multiple units that were activated for those invasions only to repeatedly fail their workups and ultimately end up sitting out the initial stages of those wars. That's shockingly bad. When you have whole divisions that are so incompetently trained that they are literally undeployable... Well, what are they even there for? The US military is huge, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that it's also extremely badly managed, and that these issues are not new. I know people who work alongside American soldiers, and the general consensus is that they are some of the least professional, most poorly trained in all of NATO. That's unbelievably bad for a military with that kind of budget and history. The US throws a lot of money at its army, but doesn't get a lot of bang for its buck. The fact that they're now struggling to maintain a single regional conflict has its roots in the struggles they experienced maintaining two simultaneous conflicts back in the early 2000s. These recent issues didn't come out of nowhere.

thanks for the detailed explanation

On the topic of orientalism that too often goes unchallenged, I'm sorry but no. Iranian civilization might be very old (though the same goes for Greece, India, China and the broader Middle East so it's not like Iran is unique here) but every individual Iranian gets a few dozen years on this Earth and it'd really suck all the same if those were to prematurely end because of an Israeli bomb. American-Israeli terror bombing isn't working in Iran not because of some quality inherent to Iranian civilization but because terror bombing doesn't work. Never worked, probably never will. See my response to Jhex for what I mean, but long story short you wouldn't be any more inclined to surrender than the Iranians are if America/Russia/insert relevant boogieman blew up the school your child/little sibling/whatever goes to.