give the strategy time to work

How much more time? The Iraq invasion has been going for four years now. How much more time? 6 months? One year? two years? Five years? How much more time? And if this strategy fails, will the Coalition of the Willing come up with another alternative strategy or will it realise it can't be done?
If this was a professional boxing match, the referee would have stopped the fight ages ago and called in the doctor. We should never have been there in the first place. Saddam Hussein was bad and so is Robert Mugabe and so was the apartheid regime in South Africa. Why was Saddam Hussein different that the Iraqi people needed to be treated this way? To call the misery being endured by the Iraqis a victory for freedom really makes one wonder.
What is at stake here is ego. Like the Monty Python sketch of the knight who doesn't know when enough is enough and is delimbed until he is nothing but a head in a helmet, so too is the mess that is Iraq. Ego, stupidity, pride, selfishness, stubborn-ness. It doesn't matter about misery of the living and the deaths of the innocents.