Whether US wanted to or intended to "colonize" the Middle East is irrelevant. For a few years US used its army so that it could hold swathes of Iraqi territory to do what it does and that is just a fact.
What exactly did the US do with vast swathes of Iraqi territory for those years?
China is the one that made out like a bandit with the new supply of Iraqi oil. The US only got a giant bill out of it all for over a trillion dollars, a lot of dead and injured soldiers, and a lot of destroyed military hardware.
What the US didn't acquire: Iraq's oil; land; tax revenue; any territorial claims; the right to station large numbers of troops in Iraqi territory; gold or other plunder.
And further, the US left when it was told to. The supposed US puppet threw the US out, and we didn't do anything to them with our military in response.
You know, colonialism and the distinction between empires and democracies is one of the preeminent topics in political science and the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If you don't care about any of that, what are we even talking about?
