We're on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and no amount of spin can change the outcome. Yet the administration continues to balk at doing the one thing that could make a difference: namely, putting more U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq to bring a measure of order and security to a nation incurring some 3,000 civilian casualties each month.
This week, two prominent conservatives, representing different wings of the conservative movement, co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post urging the administration to do just that. William Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, and Rich Lowry, editor of the old-line conservative National Review, call for the president to "order a substantial surge in overall troop levels in Iraq, with the additional forces focused on securing Baghdad."
As Mr. Kristol and Mr. Lowry note, "[w]here more U.S. troops have been deployed, the situation has gotten better. Those neighborhoods intensively patrolled by Americans are safer and more secure." But to date, the Defense Department has merely moved U.S. troops around Iraq, sending forces to secure an area and then turning it over to Iraqis. In Fallujah and elsewhere, this has proved costly because Iraqis aren't yet up to the task of holding the territory Americans gain.
It's not enough to move a finite number of American troops around from one hot spot to another. What we need is more boots on the ground. If we had twice the number of troops when we first entered Iraq, we might not be fighting there today.
There is no doubt such a strategy would be politically risky, but there is also little question it would significantly improve our chances of success on the battlefield. Democrats, whose only answer is to criticize the president for going into Iraq in the first place, can't wait to pull out all American troops, regardless of the consequences. And the administration has responded by tacitly accepting the premise we need to get our troops out as quickly as possible, while promoting the fiction that soon, very soon, the Iraqis will be able to fend for themselves, at which point we can honorably leave...
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