The US Army has concluded that Iran was the only victor of the eight-year US campaign to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and replace him with a so-called democratic regime.
The report of US Forces consist of two volumes with 1300 pages, one includes "The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006", the other includes "The U.S. Army in the Iraq War — Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011."
"At the time of this project’s completion in 2018, an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only Victor," the report stated.
The report also includes that Iraq, the traditional regional counterbalance for Iran, is at best emasculated, and at worst has key elements of its government acting as proxies for Iranian interests.
The authors of the report believe that the first years of the Iraq war were spent re-learning how to fight insurgents.
The report notes that the US Army will not attempt to invade any country with a great number of land forces from now on, with lessons learned from Iraq.
Following Vietnam, the US military treated that war as an aberration, but these officers argue that even future conflicts with rivals like Russia or China are likely to take the form of irregular warfare.
The report said that war cost the US more than $2 trillion. Almost 4,500 American service members died, with an additional 32,000 wounded in action. Credible estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties during the war reach as high as 500,000.
The report noted that the US military would not attempt to occupy any country with a large land force from Iraq after the lesson.
"Democracy does not always bring stability," the report noted, which was started to be written in 2013. Although the report was completed in 2016, it was not published.