The results of losing are things that keep me up at night or wake me up at night from a deep sleep. Maybe thats why i didnt go there.
I understand. I don't know that there is any need to specify measures for failure. Failure can simply be treated as the lack of success and not dealt with directly.
I would take issue with your measures for success. Those are very nice outcomes, ideal objectives, but I don't know that they are requirements for success in the war on terror.
I would start with wiping al quada off the face of the earth, helping the mideast toward peace, economic progress and political progress starting in iraq.
Helping the ME toward peace isn't really an objective, it's a process, one that doesn't bear directly on the US war on terror, IMO. Yes, we should all be helpful in efforts to achieve good ends. But it's not a measure of success, in general or for this particular war. Economic and political progress getting started in Iraq is an objective, but getting progress started, while better than not starting, it's not a meaningful end result, merely a marker. But Iraq, itself, is a means in the war on terror, not an end, so starting progress there is not key.
I would take your first point, wiping out al Qaeda, and it's siblings, as a suitable measure of success in the war on terror. It's more instrumental than terminal but I think close enough to be workable. A more outcome-based measure would be, IMO, that we have no more attacks on US turf in a class with 9/11 and that we have no more than a handful of minor attacks over, say, ten years and that we are able maintain our lifestyle with only negligible adjustments throughout the process. I would call that success.
Anything beyond that is gravy. Either gravy in the war on terror, or objectives in the war on Islamacism, which is another matter, a bigger war. |
