The "Surge" Option

Le Monde has a brief article taking a sober look into the President's surge plan, which is to deploy five additional brigades to Baghdad for one year within the next 45 days. Bush will make the announcement on Wednesday. Premier al-Maliki accepted the plan in a video conference with Bush last Thursday and declared that he would send in Iraqi troops to assist. However, those additional troops are not "Iraqi" troops (and let us be frank, there are no national troops; there are only Shi'a and Kurdish troops): they are Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

The surge also represents a challenge to Congress, which will forced to supply the the necessary funding or fall into the propaganda trap of not supporting our troops.

But the plan hasn't been fully fleshed out and there has been no request to Congress for the funds needed.