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The Iraqi government has declared victory over so-called Islamic State in the city of Mosul. That must be counted as a good thing for the cause of civilisation over barbarism.It's important that Islamic State be shown to be incapable of maintaining a state, that its leader may call himself a caliph but that he has no caliphate.

The movement is based on the appeal of the idea of the caliphate as a territorial entity, so discrediting the movement demands that its territory be extinguished. It's only a beginning in the long campaign against Daesh, but a vital one.

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Iran launches a cross-border missile attack against IS militants in eastern Syria that it holds responsible for recent attacks in Tehran that left 18 dead.

It's also a moment to consider the wider state of the Middle East since the threshold moment when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, with the enthusiastic support of John Howard and Tony Blair.

All the noise at the time was about Iraq's imagined weapons of mass destruction, but there was a much more ambitious project behind the war.

In making the case for the invasion, President George W. Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, explained that it was the beginning of an American-led revolution. It wasn't the invasion of a country but the transformation of an entire region. She called it "a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states" including Japan and Germany "to create a new balance of power that favoured freedom".

Rice acknowledged in her noted Cairo speech in 2005 that the US had systematically repressed democracy in the Middle East. "For 60 years, my country, the US, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither." It was a frank admission that the US had long prized access to oil over the rights of the people of the Middle East.

At the time Rice gave her Cairo speech, the arrested development of democracy in the region was glaring. In the preceding 30 years the number of democracies in the world had almost trebled. The end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet empire had seen democracy flourish in every region of the world, bar one - the Middle East. In fact, the number of democracies had shrunk from three to two. Israel and Turkey were still rated as democratic, but Lebanon had fallen from the democratic sphere. "Now" said Rice, "we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

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So how is that revolution, that balance of power to favour freedom, as she put it, looking in the Middle East today? "There's more deficit of democracy in the region today or, at least, there is no more democracy, than there was before the invasion of Iraq in 2003," says Professor Amin Saikal, director of ANU's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

Not only has the project failed, the current US president, Donald Trump, has thrown his support behind authoritarianism anew. One common explanation for the failure of democracy in the Middle East was because of Islam. Not so. How to account for the democracy in the most populous Islamic country on Earth, Indonesia, and other Muslim-majority countries with established democracies?

The fall-back claim was that Arabs, in particular, weren't suited to democracy, that they lacked maturity, that they loved their repression by strongman dictators. Of the 16 Arab states, all were dictatorships at the time of Rice's speech.But that fiction, too, was quickly exposed in the Arab Spring movement of 2012, when the peoples of six nations rose up against their strongmen at great personal risk.

There was nothing inherent in the Middle East's state of subjugation. The old excuses were just that. But, while the change in US policy may have been useful in creating an opportunity for an outbreak of democracy, it was certainly not sufficient. Democracy remains a failed project in the region.

Last year, Condoleezza Rice said that even her Middle East role model for democracy had become more cause for concern than celebration: "When I used to be asked what would the Middle East look like when it is democratic, I would say Turkey, because it looked like a country with the right institutions, it was moving closer to Europe, it was moving closer to democratic norms," she said in an interview with RealClearPolitics."A lot of that has been reversed in recent years," as Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, said Rice. "And it's a story that's been there time and time again with authoritarian governments."

America's threshold state for regional revolution, Iraq, is still far from democratic, its people far from free.Under the US intervention, Iraq fell into sectarian vengefulness, Sunni against Shia. Growing Sunni grievances created the opening for the Sunni movement of Daesh. Iraq has not had an election for seven years. Its current prime minister, Haidar al-Abadi, was installed as a result of US pressure, not the people's choice.The country is in the process of being carved into zones of influence by the Kurds, the Iranians, the government and Sunni militias.

In the six countries that took up the call to revolution in the Arab Spring, five quickly reverted to dictatorship. One, Syria, fell into savage civil war that, again, opened an opportunity for Daesh, which still hold the city of Raqqa.Only Tunisia remains a democracy, an unfortunately fragile one.

The balance of power changed after the invasion of Iraq, absolutely, but not in favour of freedom. The biggest winners are the theocratic Shia state of Iran and the hyper-repressive Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia.

And now Donald Trump has decided to take advantage of the schism between Iran and the Saudis, reverting to the pre-Bush divide and conquer policy. He's declared Iran the source of all problems and thrown America's lot in with the Saudis and their Gulf allies.The reason, he says, is that the Saudis will help to battle terrorism. Which is, of course, bizarre. The Saudis are the foremost financier and sponsor of Wahhabist extremism worldwide. The old Saudi pact is that the House of Saud gets to run the government on condition that it supports the Wahhabist fundamentalist movement to extend its global mission. None of this brings the region any closer to democracy, its people any closer to civil rights. Daesh's caliphate is being extinguished. The underlying conditions that gave rise to it remain as potent as ever.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

Read more:
Iran and Saudi Arabia, not democracy, the winners from the invasion of Iraq - The Sydney Morning Herald