Plan B in Iraq

[walrus]

I agree with you Iron Horse. There is no point in racking over the past and I'm trying to approach the problem from a business strategy approach.

To put it in narrative terms, every story needs a plot. And a plot has a starting point and an ending point. We cannot conduct coherent information operations without this "plot", otherwise they will not make sense.

For example, we can write a saccharin story about how life in such and such a town is now "better", but without a reference point its meaningless - ie: "Better than what? Better than it was under Sadaam Hussien? Better than it was before we bombed the sewerage plant? Better than it was before you shot my son? Better than it was before the death squads came? Do you see my point?

None of our information operations will link together into a coherent whole without some overarching vision of what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. I do not believe we have yet done this, although I believe there are skilled and intelligent military men that could.

It's not "over analyzing" the situation, its more of what was called in officer training as "selection and maintenance of the aim", or what Americans would perhaps call "The Mission". I always received the biggest toungue lashing from instructors when I led my troops into something without first getting it very clear what I was trying to achieve and resisting the urge to just "do something".