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Twenty years ago, the U.S. invaded Iraq to export democracy – leaving hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and millions injured. Twenty years later in 2023, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged that "U.S. forces are ready to remain in Iraq" to support the security of the entire region.

For 20 years, Washington has not learned its lesson from the misadventure. The country will not succeed in its mission in the region.

However hard the U.S. tries to justify it, its existence in Iraq is to maintain and expand its sphere of influence, and the price is local people's wellbeing and the development of the entire region. The U.S. justify its presence in the country by saying that it is trying to transform Iraq into a democracy. However, the brutal invasion has killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis since it began in 2003 to up until 2019, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Public services had gone from bad to worse during this period. People have no drinkable water, no reliable electricity, and no stable access to education. The unemployment rate has soared – roughly one in five are unemployed in Iraq, the Labor Force Survey jointly released by Iraq and the International Labor Organization indicates.

This, together with rising religious and ethnic conflicts fuelled by Washington's intervention, is pushing some Iraqi young people toward terrorism. The extremist group Islamic State seized the opportunity to rise as a powerful terrorist group within a short span of time in the region.

The U.S. failed its promise: Iraq is far from "liberal democracy." The oil-rich country is deeply scarred, and the trauma has never gone away. 

Leaving Iraq a wounded nation, the U.S. failed in achieving its strategic goals either. Washington deployed its troops to Iraq to expand its clout and ensure that its influence and hegemony remain unchallenged, but ended up seeing increasing influences of its rivals in the region.

To combat the Islamic State, the Iraqi government has to rely on external forces. In this context, Iran, a country that the U.S. has regarded as an enemy since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, has seen its influences growing in the past decade. Washington's 2003 invasion and the subsequent uprooting of Saddam Hussein's regime provided its rivals opportunities to develop and have more say on regional affairs.

Leaving Iraq and the entire region in tatters, American troops have been stretched thin. Nine in 10 American military officers say the Iraq war had stretched the military "dangerously thin" and that the U.S. could not fight another large-scale war, according to a survey by Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security. Against this backdrop, Russia and other major powers had to step in to combat the Islamic State and help local reconstruction. This, without doubt, is accompanied with their growing influences in the region, which is not what the U.S. wanted or is happy to see.

The U.S. invaded Iraq to expand its sphere of influence – under the cloak of democracy. What's the result? Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost; a country destroyed; and the U.S. left to see the influence of its rivals growing substantially.

Austin has pledged to continue working to accomplish the mission of fighting the Islamic State, but domestic politics mean America's existence in Iraq is not a good choice. Against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, rising populist sentiments, and the approaching elections, the Biden administration's decision to have American troops remain in Iraq is unlikely to win support from voters.

It has been 20 years since the U.S. made the wrong decision on Iraq. But Washington has seemingly not learned its lesson from this catastrophic invasion yet.

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