From Byron’s piece today:

“We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,” Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War. And that, in turn, “gives you the impression that [U.S. troops] are just there — kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they’re down.” …“The frustration is that the definition of success has now gotten to be, how many innocent people are dying?” the president said. “And if there’s a lot dying, it means the enemy is winning.” He paused. “That doesn’t mean they’re winning.”

Me: OK, you made a decision not to count bodies. You had a point. There was a downside to body counting, I don’t disagree. But not counting bodies, not showing the American public that our military is going after the Bad Guys and eliminating the Bad Guys, turns out to have an even steeper downside.

So don’t just stay the course with that decision. It didn’t come down from Sinai and it isn’t written in stone. If Americans could see that every day America’s enemies — al Qaeda terrorists, Saddamist insurgents and Iranian agents — were being eliminated by U.S. forces, they’d see this conflict differently. (And if that’s not what is happening, what is?)

We have indeed allowed the dominant metric to become that “people are dying and so the enemy is winning.” The MSM have driven that message hard. The enemy can continue to make people die so the public will go on thinking the enemy is winning. And if the enemy is winning, we’re losing. In such a circumstance, the public will conclude: Better to cut our loses now than endure slow-motion defeat.

It’s this simple: Change the metrics or lose the war.