The military doctrine, plans, aims we talked about publicly were unfortunately quite different from the reality of what happened. I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing - I'm talking about the unnecessary and unjustified invasion of Iraq. Yes there hasn't been a world war - but in Iraq there are continuing tribal conflicts. We didn't create an era of peace there.
This article says 300k civilians died in the immediate wartime, more died in the aftermath. For example, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/20/iraq-broken-...:
With little doubt, the United States broke Iraq. U.S. forces succeeded in the campaign to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein... But what followed turned into a debacle for U.S. grand strategy, and a traumatic nightmare for much of Iraqi society.
The war, driven by the hubris of the Bush administration and a supportive Washington establishment — as well as what has to be described at this point as a vengeful post-9/11 bloodlust that permeated American society — is now widely seen as a generational American mistake. ... According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, many of the 306,000 estimated deaths in the Iraq war were of civilians killed by “direct war related violence” between 2003 and 2019, a span of time that saw Iraq convulsed by waves of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, and its cities ravaged by terrorist attacks and airstrikes.
The consensus now, even among formerly hawkish Republicans, is that the United States should never have invaded Iraq 20 years ago. ...
“Iraq quickly fell prey to chaos, conflict and instability, experienced an uncountable number of deaths and displacements, and the erosion of health, education and basic services,” wrote Iraqi academic Balsam Mustafa. “Behind the statistics, there are untold stories of agony and suffering. The structural and political violence would spill into social and domestic violence, affecting women and children. With every life lost, a whole family is shattered. From day one, the conditions were forming for the emergence of terrorist groups and militias.”