Are 12,000 more troops really the answer?

This is getting a lot of play today.

"The ferocity with which the war is being waged by both sides is escalating," said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It is not just that the number of incidents are increasing. The war looks to be changing in character."

Retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked in Iraq with the U.S. occupation authority last year, said he is worried that the move represents a setback for the basic U.S. strategy of placing a greater burden on Iraqi security forces to control the country and deal with the insurgency. "I fear that it signals a re-Americanization . . . [sic] of our strategy in Iraq," he said.

Adding troops at this point is the opposite of what senior Pentagon officials expected when the war began in March 2003.

Before the invasion, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dismissed an estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government. "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators," Wolfowitz told a congressional committee, "and that will help us to keep requirements down."

While this is a splendid opportunity to once again point out that Paul Wolfowitz has proven himself an unmitigated disaster as a war planner, what else is the point here? None of the stories I've seen have asked the most basic of questions: Besides giving 12,000 more U.S. soldiers the opportunity to die or be grievously injured, how is going from 138,000 troops in Iraq to 150,000 going to improve the situation there?

And the other question that continues to go un-asked: Why does the Pentagon repeatedly behave as though the U.S. military is the only actor in Iraq? In other words, what modern military (or football team, for that matter) assumes that in war, their side is the only one that can determine an outcome; that the other side will simply do what we want them to do, like just fall down dead when our troops attack?

American commanders said they learned an important lesson [emphasis added] when insurgents responded to the offensive against Falluja by mounting their own counteroffensive, attacking police stations and a range of Iraqi security forces in other cities.

I'm glad American commanders are learning important lessons, such as when you launch an offensive against the enemy, they just might launch a counteroffensive. Apparently, they've never considered that scenario at West Point.

Tough to win a war when you consistently underestimate the enemy's capability, isn't it?