On March 19, 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 ... ---
With the above in mind, here's my nominee for quote of the week from Iraq (with a small bow to the military paper, Stars and Stripes):
The reconstituted Iraqi army took another step Sunday toward leading stabilization efforts in its own country, opening its first national headquarters since the US-led invasion. The Iraqi Ground Forces Headquarters was inaugurated by a "small group of Iraqi and coalition dignitaries" at an undisclosed location in Baghdad, according to Multinational Force-Iraq officials Monday ... "We are celebrating today a historical event and the rebuilding of the Iraqi army. Having the headquarters of our ground forces here is an indication of the Iraqi army controlling its own destiny," Iraqi Ground Forces commander General Abdul Qadir Jassim said, according to the statement.Asia times
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