Let's say that you have a difficult project to accomplish on a tight schedule. The schedule is important, but so is getting it done properly. The project could be anything - organizing enough labor to harvest your shiraz grapes, optimizing the stress on a wing spar, removing 160,000 troops from a middle eastern country, or developing a prototype of your technology to show your investors to get the next round of venture financing.
You break the problem down into pieces, listening, of course, to the advice of your experts and the professionals in your line of work. You select some major milestones and put them on your calendar. Then you take a good hard look, ideally subject to the review of people who aren't necessarily on your side, to identify what it will take for you to hit your milestones on time.
You get the people who control your money to give you enough, and sufficient other resources like people or equipment, and maybe a little extra to cope with the unforeseen stuff that inevitably crops up. Finally, you work like crazy to hit each milestone in order, and document in a verifiable way that you have done so.
There are errors and traps you can fall into doing this. Probably the biggest is to put the schedule in a position of greater importance over getting the work done. You have to do both. And sometimes the schedule has to slip a little in order to get the job done properly, as in engineering, but sometimes it can't, as in a harvest.
Apropos of troop withdrawal, the first thing to discuss is "what do you want?" My personal view is that if Iraq were left in whatever state it would have been in had Saddam Hussein been overthrown by the Iraqi people in 2003 themselves, thus removing our casus belli, then that outcome would be sufficient. Whatever political structures the Iraqis develop for themselves, in my view, is Iraqi business. If the place descends into civil war, or chaos, or partitions itself into several mini-states, fine. You could argue that Iraq'd be no worse off than than it would have been had they rid themselves of their own dictator, and indeed, with the Ba'ath party largely out of the picture, they might very well be in better shape.
Oh, and we should at the very least fix all the infrastructure we smashed.
That's just one guy's opinion, of course, and there really should be a proper debate about it. But the steps ought to run like this:
- Figure out what we want besides "troops home soonest"
- Figure out when "soonest" is subject to 1.
- Identify milestones necessary to get to 2.
- Identify resources necessary to get to 3:
- Fund and support properly.
- Execute plan.
This is a basic project management strategy, and a lot of us here do this sort of work professionally. Agreeing on what we want is always the hard part though. If you can't articulate your requirements well, you are sure not to achieve them.
But to conclude, I think the question needs to be posed as follows:
- What would Iraq be like today if Saddam had been deposed before the invasion?
- What would Iraq be like if we left at once?
- Is 2 better than 1?
- If yes, withdraw troops immediately. End.
- If no, what steps would make 2 better than 1?
- Take such steps.
- Go to 2.