The war on terror is being fought on two fronts: the military front and the information front.
The military front consists of our forces eliminating the bad guy who seeks to cause the U.S. harm before he is capable and willing to attack our citizens and interests. This front includes intelligence gathering, military operations, and in some cases, diplomatic attempts backed with the threat of force.
The information war consists of the message that we relay to the enemy, the world, and even to ourselves about the effectiveness of our operations and the effect that it is having on the enemy's ideology. We are attempting to fix their ideology as one of passive resistance instead of active and willing resistance.
These fronts overlap in many areas and impact each other greatly, but on a scale of importance, the information front is more vital to our interests than the military front. Unlike past wars, the war on terror has no boundaries, no statehood, and no individual that acts as the keystone of the movement. Instead, extremist fanaticism exists and is proliferated throughout the world by individuals that have the will and ability to employ terror and recruit others to serve the same interests. Can these persons ever be completely stopped or completely eliminated? No. In fact, for that reason our military front must endure and seek to destroy the enemy. However, in a very real sense, we can win the information front or at least prevent the enemy from winning - we can and must improve in this area, currently we are losing.
I say that we are losing definitively and we are - partly because of the ambiguity of our goals throughout fighting in the Iraq war. President Bush has repeatedly stated that we will leave Iraq when the mission is complete. At other times, President Bush defines mission completeness as the ability for Iraq to govern and defend itself. This goal, while noble, is incredible ambiguous because it does not contain the quantitative or qualitative measures that evaluate success. Instead, it relies on the discretion of one person to determine when the mission is complete and we can relinquish our presence. As an officer in the Army, I am incredibly familiar with goal setting and evaluation, for both missions and individuals. Throughout the goal setting process, one must achieve intermediate goals and evaluate the process, these steps act as a roadmap to an end state. Do we have a roadmap in Iraq? Are there measures for success? If we do, what is the harm of communicating those measures publicly for the support of the information front, so that the Iraqi people know what they must accomplish before we can depart? By establishing, publishing, and pushing these goals we can alleviate the need for a timetable and have a definitive course for an exit, thus improving our credibility with the Iraqis and our own citizenry. As a veteran of both OIF I and OIF III, and through many months of working with the Iraqi Police, I can say without a doubt that the Iraqis are happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein - this is not the debate. However, they are tired of the 8 hour long lines at the gas pump, the relentless traffic congestion behind military convoys, the threat of IEDs, crime, and extortion. I acknowledge that all things must come at a cost, and this has been an extraordinary cost to both ourselves and to the Iraqis, but in the end we must continue to improve. I call on the Bush administration and appeal to reason to publish the intermediate goals that govern our success and withdrawal in Iraq. In doing so, we can effectively fight and succeed at both the military front and the information front.
If you decide to respond to this entry, please address the italicized questions in the previous paragraph, as they are truly the crux of what I am getting at.