Is it too much too ask for a "strategic objective"?

To surge or not to surge?
To bring the troops home today, or next month, or next year, or next decade?
It is impossible to answer questions regarding appropriate strategy in the absence of a strategic objective.

To date I've heard NO ONE suggest just what that strategic objective might be.

Not Congressional leaders, not the Presidential Candidates of either party, certainly not W or his Administration.

All prattle on about "strategy" in a vacuum.

What, exactly, is our strategic objective in Iraq?

In a High-Performance Teams training workshop which I attended several years ago, one of the teams came up with a pretty good idea: "begin at the end." What does the end-state look like? Where are we now? How are we going to get from where we are now to the end-state we seek? Knowing where we are now isn't sufficient: if you don't know where you're going, likely you'll not get to someplace you want.

Is it too much to ask our leaders - in Congress, in DoD, in Dept of State, on the campaign trail - to clearly define the end state we seek in Iraq?

Maybe if we knew where we wanted to go we could have productive discussions about how to get there. Without that end-state in mind, all the babble about troop deployments, Iraqi intransigence, etc., is meaningless.