Stop the body counts!

Points to consider:

• In Vietnam, the defenders of that conflict fell to using the statistics on enemy dead to imply that they were making progress.
  
• In Iraq, the critics of that conflict have fallen to using the statistics on American dead to imply that we are failing.

Body counts are a losing strategy either way. Quantitative numbers, unless they are really huge (I mean Indian Ocean Tsunami huge), just do not give any sense of success or failure. They will either fall on deaf ears or simply re-enforce pre-conceived notions.

So what is the winning strategy?

I'm frankly stumped.