On March 19th, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discussed the “metrics” of measuring success in Iraq with Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Here is part of that interview:

“NPR: I want to start, Mr. Secretary, with something you said recently. You were at a meeting with troops, taking questions from troops. You talked about measuring progress in Iraq. Metrics as you called them, that were important to you. And you said what you measure improves. How are some ways that you are measuring progress in defeating insurgents in Iraq?

“RUMSFELD: Well, we’ve got literally dozens of ways we do it. We have a room here, the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.

“We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. And what we’re seeing, for example, and one metric is presented graphically and it shows that we had spiked up during the sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked up again during the election, and are now back down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are considerably lower… [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we’ve captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba’athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way…. No one number is determinative, and the answer is no. We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression. It’s impressionistic more than determinative.”

The Generals Predict, Wax Optimistic, Declare Victory in Sight, Grow Anxious, Gripe, Mutter, Complain about Iraqis, Speculate, Worry, Grouse, and Refuse to Be Identified

On May 9, New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt wrote a (way) inside-the-paper Iraq update, Rebels Said to Have Pool of Bomb-Rigged Cars, filled with quotes from a dozen unnamed “senior” American military officers as well as unnamed intelligence officials. A relatively short piece, it was long on speculation and generally upbeat prediction, and so typical of that moment, only two-weeks old and now, seemingly, long gone. The car bombings in Baghdad were just then spiking, causing carnage, and yet “these officers” suggested that this was “possibly a last-ditch effort,” that such attacks were aimed at “bolstering insurgent moral that flagged after the Jan. 30 elections.” Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas III, the senior military intelligence officer in Iraq (and a rare named source in the piece), commented, “When he cranks up the propaganda campaign it means we’ve probably hurt him.”

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