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They didn't die for nothing. They defeated a tyrant who had killed hundreds of thousands of people and who, incidentally, was routinely firing missiles at our pilots. Beyond that, they killed thousands of jihadists who would have tried to kill Americans elsewhere in the world, for example in Afghanistan, if they hadn't first been killed in Iraq. And while they were in Iraq, American troops acted as a check against the recreation of the Caliphate - which is the goal of Al Qaeda but which can't occur as long as Baghdad is kept out of jihadist hands.

Finally, your complaint about the war being fought for nothing is really a complaint against Obama having unilaterally pulled American troops from Iraq. So in reality, the complaint isn't against the war but against the way Obama abandoned American gains in the war.

By ousting Saddam we turned a country that had been the biggest enemy of Iran into Iran’s closest ally

Under Saddam Iraq was secular/nominally Sunni. The government we put in is Shiite, and the new constitution starts by saying Islam is the source of all law

“Thanks, George Bush, for destroying our enemy and replacing him with our Shiite allies” - Iran

Hussein needed to go and his sons needed to go. However, we went in without really looking at the strategic ends and how to achieve them. I’ve personally chatted with one of the war planners, and OIF was a clusterf**k from the outset.

Example:

One of the national strategic goals was to have the Iraqis take over their own country quickly and run all command and control thus allowing us to exit quickly. However, I’m sure you remember the famous “shock and awe” campaign. What was its purpose? The destruction of the entire Iraqi command and control network. Also, the decision was made (I don’t know by who, I assume Bush) to disband the Iraqi military. So who was going to run the show? What were those former Iraqi Soldiers going to do now? The foreign invaders smashed their military and fired anyone they didn’t kill, now what were they going to do for money? Hence a major piece of the wonderful insurgency we dealt with for almost a decade. These decisions matter, and they were some bad decisions.

That’s not even getting into the internal military problems with regards to building progress year-to-year versus each higher-level officer trying to reinvent the wheel so as to get a better OER. In Iraq and Afghanistan we fought a dozen or so one-year wars, not a 12-year war.

I don’t necessarily think that we shouldn’t have gone in to Afghanistan or Iraq, but we sure as hell should’ve had a better clue what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Bremer famously remarked to a colleague on his way out the door to Iraq that he’d see his colleague by Christmas. His colleague had a better grasp of what was about to happen and told Bremer we’d be lucky if we got out of there in 10 years.