Measures of effectiveness

Operationalize and test. A key to evaluating any policy is to (1) decide what you are trying to accomplish, and (2) figure out a way to measure your results. Number (2) is hard, and if done incorrectly the measuring device can be more misleading than helpful. (Remember body counts?) Number (1) is harder. All too often we don't know what we are trying to achieve, and/or different people are supporting the same policy in order to achieve different ends. These problems can be papered over in the politics of coalition-building, but they don't go away. Agreeing on an adequate measure of success or failure forces us to look at the problem.

Consider Iraq. What is the goal? What is the ultimate goal, and how do we know if we are getting there?

At least some people recognize the problem.

Addendum (thanks to Instapundit): You want numbers? I got numbers. Compiled by the Brookings Institution, and very interesting. A few preliminary conclusions, based on what I skimmed:

1. Things were much worse last year than they are today.
2. The general political and economic trends continue to be in the right direction.
3. The native resistance is fairly large (around 20,000 and recruiting enough each month to more than cover losses), but what most of them are fighting for is an end to the shame of occupation by foreign powers.
4. There is a small core of commited Islamists (in the low hundreds), mostly from Saudi Arabia, who see the struggle as being about creating a base for a global religious/ideological war.
5. The vast majority of the population is focused, and rationally so, on getting clean water and reliable electricity. They are generally optimistic about the future. I suspect they'd be happy to see the ideologues kill one another and leave their families alone.
   

I'm still reading. Very, very interesting, and much more telling than the crap on the evening news. A major limitation to keep in mind: people taking polls in a war zone are more likely to tell the interrogator what they think he wants to hear. I don't think its a significant problem, since the poll numbers appear to reflect facts on the ground, but keep it in mind.