Quote Originally Posted by MikeF View Post
I probably missed a few components,
I think building walls around the population always "works." It's also worth noting that the objective changed from the impossible - spreading democracy across the Middle East - to the very achievable "lowering violence."

Setting the objective is above everyone's pay grade, but if you set an impossible objective, failure is guaranteed.

I've also longed maintained that the single most important metric - to the schlep watching TV - was US casualties. As long as few of "our guys" are getting killed, we're not too worried about much else going on in Iraq because we figure most government projects are SNAFU and if the bureaucrats didn't waste money in Iraq they'd waste it here, so we can't get too worked up about reconciliation, rebuilding or the lack there of.