As it is, it's Nation Building and we've never had very good success at that.
On the contrary - the US is the world champion “nation builder”, the only other real contenders are the British. Its just that this business is very difficult, and in the ME, very difficult.
Its not likely in hindsight that the thing could have been won earlier, as the real problem there was not war as such, it was building Iraqi institutions, in particular the army. No army = no state.
The problem is we did fight it as a war, but the war part was more or less over when we booted out Sadam, and the mission became nation building. Instead we spent a disasterous couple of years on nation destruction, turned productive folks into an insurgency that made it ripe for an infestation of Al Qaeda types.
Nation building is tough, and it is not clear anyone has ever been very good at it other than perhaps the Brits who have left some reasonably successful countries in their wake (took a couple of centuries though).