Just got around to reading the remarks Rumsfeld gave Monday at John Hopkins. Excellent stuff. A few things in particular jumped out at me.

“…tips to authorities from ordinary Iraqis have grown from 483 to 4,700 tips in a month.”
This is the sort of data I would love to see more of.

“…one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks.”
An effect of the media’s focus on the day to day violence is a lack of strategic context in most newspaper or television stories. I got really steamed about this back in September during the fighting in Tal Afar and Grim has addressed this question more recently .

I really don’t know if I’m expecting too much from the media. I wasn’t alive during WWII, nor was I around during the formative years of the Cold War. So maybe newspaper stories and television spots have never provided a strategic context for current events. But then again the world was easier to understand then, and so maybe the average American had a better understanding of the larger context.

What I do know is that statements like this raise my blood pressure faster than somebody talking about Aaron Freakin’ Boone:
“The Baghdad attacks appeared as well to call into question a notion that top U.S. military officers in the region had begun to articulate about
insurgent activity shifting out of the cities and moving west.”
WaPo, Sept. 14

Meanwhile, the folks over at Stratfor (subscription only, sadly) are able to give the context for the attacks. They point out that the bombings being discussed in the WaPo story were the first time Zarqawi reacted so directly to a specific counterinsurgency opteration (specifically the operations around Tal Afar), and infer that he was feeling pressure.

The difference between these two perspectives is trivial for anyone who plays go. If we think of the operations in the west of Iraq as a pivotal ko battle, we can recognize Zarqawi’s attacks as attempts to force a responce away from the ko. Stratfor recognizes the underlying strategy (there is a ko battle and it is located in the west); the WaPo only recognizes the latest play (there was just a stone placed in Baghdad). WaPo is not inaccurate ; there were attacks in Baghdad. It is just incomplete.

We need to be horizontal thinkers, we need to be systems thinkers. We need to recognize the difference between symptoms and causes. We need to distinguish between the governing dynamics and the effects of those dynamics.