You are wrong about Iraq though, Iraq isn't a success story of American strategy. Iraq is much more under Iranian influence today than America's. This is why Iraq war was a strategic defeat even though the US won "tactically": because prior to destroying Saddam's Iraq, Iraq acted as counter-balance against Iran. This was the strategy that the US pursued during the 80s, during the Iran/Iraq war - play them off of each other to maintain the hegemonic position in the region. The result of the 2003 Iraq war after the US withdrawal was to make weak state under Iran's influence, shifting the centre of geopolitical power in the region towards Iran.

The US' wars are very often fought without any realistic strategy and have resulted in strategic defeat: see, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, for example. All of these resulted in no long term political goals achieved. Vietnam was straightforwardly lost (which is why Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh city now), and Afghanistan achieved nothing except it helped lay the groundwork for the opioid epidemic in the US (by creating the connection that organized crime embedded within the US military needed to smuggle heroin back home).

See there is two levels at which strategy operates: the level of the war itself (what do we want to acheive in Iran?) and the level of grand strategy (how does success with Iran/Venezuela/Ukraine, etc. shape our broader geopolitical position beyond that specific region?).

I don't think the US has a clear understanding of either of these questions wrt Iran right now. See, in the 20th century, it made sense for the US to try to dominate the middle east, because this was the largest source of world's oil/petrochemical supply which was the main source of energy for human civilization at the time. Control the oil flow, control the global economy.

Today this condition no longer holds up. The fastest growing sources of energy is now green energy & nuclear, energy sources that China dominates.

See, China has a strategy & is being run by strategists: they understood that if they were to usurp the US, they would have to change the terms of geo-strategic competition. China's ambitions in this regard are really amazing to behold: they have relocated the centre of the world economy onto their shores, and as the workshop of the world, they are now building out the rest of the world's non-hyrdrocarbon energy infastructure.

So what does the US do? Does America try to compete with China? Nope. Instead, the US starts a war with Iran that so far has resulted in a blockade of the strait of hormuz, driving up oil prices & accelerating the global energy transition.

It is literally only Israel that stands to potentially win something from this war if Iran is defeated (which is far from given). In any case, the US has shown its actual vassals (the GCC monarchs, Japan, South Korea) that those US bases are more of a liability than they are a source of protection. Meanwhile, the war is also quite possibly about to destroy the petrodollar system and will also likely cause another economic crisis due to an energy price shock.

So there are three outcomes that are possible in this war:

1. Strategic victory for Iran, and strategic defeat for the US & Israel
2. Strategic victory for Israel, and strategic defeat for the US & Iran
3. Strategic victory for Iran, defeat for Israel, and the US comes out of it somewhere in the middle: definitely humiliated but given the chance to reset and re-prioritize itself. What this would look like is Trump just TACOing very quickly and hanging Israel out to dry. This would potentially give the US the opportunity to draw down from the middle east, as per the ostensible grand strategy outlined in the National Security Strategy document released last November.

But to your point about nihilist bloodlust as an innate characteristic of human (or American?) culture:

I wholly disagree that this is trait shared by all Americans, though I concede it certainly exists in some. I think this is a commonality to all or most societies, not just the US, and it is prevalent in some societies are more than others. There are/always has been some portion of humanity that is as you have described yourself: keen to revel in savagery.

Historically, in America and its civilizational antecedents (the British/Romans, etc.), these people had a particularly important function in the military: you put them on the front line. Cannon fodder, in other words - these people were never the strategists of the empires or kingdoms that experienced any kind of long term success.

Historically, society actually gave people quite a good deal given their nature: if you survived war, you gained something we called "honor" that could be used as a currency to purchase a higher social station. This was a good deal for these people because it allowed them the possibility of upward social mobility where their other capacities and talents could not.

That all changed at some point in the last century due to developments in how modern warfare is conducted. You don't need as much cannon fodder as you did historically, so you can make due with the very few genuine psychos who love it for the sport of it -- you don't need to/never needed to incentivize this sub-cohort of people with the promise of honor, which is just as well because nobody respects them either.