The objectives were defined, but the resources and strategy necessary to acheive them have not been utilized.
This is partly right, and leaves out a very important part of 'winning'. War is ugly, and a very practical endeavor. Achieving your objective is part of winning. But, it is only useful to achieve your objective because it is "worth" something to you. The objective has some value. And attaining the objective has some cost. This is not a romantic objective, nor an unrealistic immature activity where the costs don't matter. As a practical matter, the costs had better be lower than the value you obtain by achieving the objective (assuming you have done a good analysis, and you're reasonably certain the objective CAN BE OBTAINED). If it cost you more than the objective was worth to you, you made a huge mistake going in the first place. We achieved an objective in 2 weeks by taking Baghdad. We failed miserably to anticipate how things would go after that, and we've paid the price for that failure to plan all the way through the activity. Now we're babysitting a sectarian civil war between religous factions, fanned by Al Qaeda to drain the US military, and fanned by Iran and Syria so they don't have a successful democracy on their border which would encourage their populace to overthrow their autocrats. Meanwhile, lots of Al Qaeda is running free in Pakistan or eastern Afghanistan, they've bombed Bali, London, and Madrid, so they are still operative. I think we've been more effective fighting Al Qaeda by tightening immigration for Arabs and tracking their funds, and the occasional Predator strike at a meeting place, plus domestic surveilance. Most of our advance against the war on terror has NOT come in Iraq, in fact none of it has come in Iraq IMO. The biggest tragedy in Iraq will not come from winning or losing, the biggest tragedy in Iraq is that even if we 'win', it will have cost WAY more than it will ever be worth to the US. We are in this position because our leadership is too simple minded to plan and evaluate the complete and complex event that a war in Iraq represents. It was not nearly as simple as 'taking Baghdad', but that seems to be as far as the planning went.
