Has it done anything beneficial for America?
Not having to deal with Saddam and the eventual nuke he would have obtained is to me a positive (now, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road, eventually he would have got one/more than one). So in that respect we're vastly ahead.
Getting rid of a brutal dictator, his brutal sons, that also is a positive, especially in light of us being responsible for him coming to power.
Whether our Iraq efforts, despite being very badly managed and the Iraqi's doing everything they possibly could/can to F their neighbor over which in the end means F'ing themselves and their future generations over, will be worth it......only time will tell.
Hopefully the bloodbath days were enough for them to get it out of their system and grow up...problem is, even if that's true for the average Iraqi, their Leadership needs to have had a 'come to Allah' experience as well. Given how corrupt they are over there, and with such F'd up value system...who knows really.
I think one good thing that should have come of this is that Iraq will serve as a good template for future POTUS's to apply to whatever conflict they ponder undertaking. Inputs such as dumbFness of the population, corruption of the population, standing military, willingness to riot instead of build, wealth, values, population density, etc. etc. etc. can be gamed for what we went through in Iraq an applied as best as possible to future scenarios so as to give the POTUS at that time some kind of idea on if 'going in' is going to even work or not. Prior to Iraq, the past real example we had to go with was Vietnam, which for many things, does not apply to current scenarios (but in many areas admittedly it does).
We'll see is the only real answer that can be given........
Chuck