Indeed, the nation as a whole has been incompetent, incompetent of being a united nation. Not the administration alone, not the contractors alone, have been inept. Much of this simply lies at the feet of division. When one fraction of the nation is busy making life as difficult as possible for the rest of the nation, clumsiness is an inevitable result.

It doesn't matter whether the challenge was the right one or not, whether it was a good decision or based on half-truths or misunderstood/prejudiced intelligence, it really doesn't matter what we have been trying to do or why we have been trying to do it. We may be trying to reduce drug use, eliminate HIV, establish democracy in Iraq, create a transportation system that uses less energy and produces less pollution, eliminating criminal aliens... it doesn't matter, we are all stepping on each other's toes. Lawyers are deep in the muddle, politicians, the press, they all spend their time obstructing the work of others; calumny and accusations, an attempt to derail any success and trumpet any hardships, the willingness to forgo any benefit of cooperation to pull the other person away from their goal.

Of course no nation can trust the US as a friend. At best they can only get half the country, and when they do, they invariably end up with an enemy at least as strong. Colombia, Poland, Israel - as soon as one side tries to support the nation, the other side tries to fight it.

We need a clear victory within our nation before we can hope for national survival.

Oh dear. Don't you understand the point of democracy? It doesn't mean we agree with each other: it means we have procedures which help us live together despite disagreeing. United, in the sense you seem to mean, means tyranny.

I'm not so sure you understand the implications of democracy;

Democracy as you describe it is a wonderful innovation for the completely isolated state. in theory, it would allow people to live together, as long as they were in factions that were all so mutually afraid or apathetic that they didn't dare fight.

However, democracy is completely insufficient as a form of government when the people are willing, for whatever reason, to do endless battle. It turns into the tyranny of the majority, as Aristotle noted. Further, when faced with exterior challenges, democracy is only going to work at all if people realize that they must stand together rather than some fraction of them siding with the external aggressor.

Democracy then must be rooted in the willingness of people to cooperate, even make some sacrifices for the benefit of others within the democracy.

This is easily modeled by various game theory constructs, such that cooperation is regularly rewarded, but an unwillingness to forgive and give in is the direct path to ruination.