Cheney's War

A cynic would argue, and I'm certainly among them, that Cheney has wanted failure from the beginning.
A competent, functional Iraqi government would not be signing 30 year oil leases with western companies from a position of abject weakness.
The push for war made for some strange bedfellows: neocons who wanted to eliminate a threat to Israel's territorial ambitions, the oil companies who stood to make tremendous profits from the instability premium and the possibility of aquiring huge Iraqi reserves at fire sale prices, Islamophobic christianists , christo-facist and the "American Empire" chest-beating crowd.
These can be overlapping categories, and Cheney for example fits more than one. But with Cheney driving the bus - it's always been about the oil.