THE LOW POST: Treading Water in Iraq

This whole sales campaign designed to pitch a new troop increase -- hilariously called a "surge" in the new "Iraq Policy Mark IV" that President Bush is planning to announce with a straight face this week -- is one of the more outrageous media deceptions in the history of an Iraq war that has been rife with them. President Bush is going to go on TV this week and tell the American people that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is somehow going to make a difference in the security situation. He is going to be aided in this effort by a legion of knucklehead editorialists who entered the New Year pimping a preposterous new creation story about Iraq, one that argues that the Iraqi-American Eden was spoiled only by arrogant generals and Pentagon officials who tried to secure an occupied country on the cheap.

This absurd interpretation of events, pitched hardest by (among others) Washington's reigning power-worshipper/professional Crate and Barrel shopper David Brooks, pins the blame for the Iraq mess on such persons as Don Rumsfeld, George Casey and John Abizaid, all of whom sold Bush on a "light footprint" strategy for occupying Iraq. "Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment," Brooks wrote last week. "But sometimes good men make bad choices, and it is now clear that the light-footprint approach has been a disaster."

According to Brooks and a lot of other people in Washington (our possible next president, John McCain, among them), everything in Iraq would have been OK from the start, if we'd only had enough troops.

Coming to this realization now -- three and a half years late, as it were -- gives all these people a chance to argue one more time for a troop increase. They're going to get that increase now, and if history is any guide, they'll patiently give that troop increase another few years to work. When it doesn't, bet on it, they will come back once again and say that what they got was not a big enough increase, that what was needed was a full-blown commitment, a "Super-Marshall Plan," etc. And then we will be in Iraq until 2011 or 2012, just like everyone in Iraq (who's seen the huge embassy complexes we're just now breaking ground on) already knows we will be.

The whole idea that "more troops" are needed in Iraq is absurd on its face. They sell this idea in America as though our soldiers are being sent to patrol the streets like New York City cops policing Malcolm X Boulevard on foot -- spreading goodwill, talking to shopkeepers, collaring the occasional fare-jumper, and scaring off the odd stick-up kid by their very presence.