Surge Size

General Casey testified that he thought a surge to Baghdad smaller than what the President has resolved to carry out would be sufficient. He thought two brigades to Baghdad (7,000) instead of the five planned (17,500) would work.

Casey's estimate is more in line with what I thought was good enough (5,000) in my take-down Sadr option when I speculated what we might do if we surge.

I stand by my opinion that a new strategy does not require new troops--but new troops will certainly make the military tasks easier to accomplish.

The whole Senate debate reflects my worries over the non-military repercussions of adding troops even temporarily. We need a surge of patience and not troops and this surge may cost us more on the patience side than it will gain for us tactically. The race between winning in Iraq and losing hope of winning just got more complicated.

I started to think that the surge would help Iraqi morale by seeing a visible sign of commitment that a change in strategy wouldn't provide, that troop morale might be improved seeing a visible sign of commitment to victory, and that the enemy might be discouraged seeing the opposite of a withdrawal taking place even after our November election results.

But the debate taking place in Congress will wreck those potential benefits, I think. Rather than seeing more troops as a commitment to stay in Iraq a figurative "eleven years," the surge might be viewed as a last gasp that just has to be endured for a short time.

And unfortunately, the opposition has crossed the Rubicon prodded by the so-called surge. They are now emboldened to advocate retreat openly and are looking ahead to presidential primaries. The outcome of the debate about blocking the surge might mean we will have accelerated the rate of our shrinking reservoir of patience that we had before the surge was announced.

The surge can certainly work in conjunction with the new strategy. But the debate over the surge is harming our war effort. Once again our anti-war side is demonstrating the price of dissent that they clearly value more than victory.