Right Side of the Rainbow

Despite opposition from their superiors at the Pentagon, American combat commanders in Iraq will recommend a “surge” in the number of U.S. troops in theatre, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The approval of a troop increase plan by top Iraq commanders, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr. and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, comes days before Bush unveils a new course for the troubled U.S. involvement in Iraq. Bush still must address concerns among some Pentagon officials and overcome opposition from Congress, where many Democrats favor a blue-ribbon commission’s recommendation for the gradual withdrawal of combat troops.

But the recommendation by commanders in Iraq is significant because Bush has placed prime importance on their advice. The U.S. command in Iraq decided to recommend an increase of troops several days ago, prior to meetings in Baghdad this week with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates …

And what, you ask, will the new troops do? Good question:

Within the military, some officers favor using a buildup of forces to confront radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, perhaps by moving forces into Sadr City, the Shiite slum in Baghdad where he has his political base.

Other military leaders say a larger force should be used to improve the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy and take more effective measures to protect Iraqis. These officers favor a plan developed by retired Gen. Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, to use the extra troops to secure mixed Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods where most of the sectarian violence is taking place.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but these two schools of thought don’t seem all that far apart:

The U.S. military now considers forces loyal to Sadr to be the top threat to the security of Iraq. [Emphasis added.]

Wouldn’t there be less sectarian violence in Baghdad if Muqtada Sadr — the “top threat to the security of Iraq” — didn’t have a base of operations in Baghdad? At the very least, Sadr’s sudden incapacitation could hardly be disabling to Keane and Kagan’s goal of securing mixed neighborhoods.

When deploying your armed forces, the relevant question is always, “Who needs killing?” (If no one needs killing, you require the services of a diplomat or politician, not a soldier.) It appears we have here at least a partial answer to that question.

By the way, I didn’t know this. Did you?

Because the Joint Chiefs are not part of the military’s formal chain of command, the recommendation to increase or decrease [the number of troops] will go from commanders in Iraq to [SecDef Robert] Gates and then to Bush. [Emphasis added.]

That made me curious about the chain of command, and upon further reading I found this, which I also didn’t know:

The SecDef and the President of the United States together constitute the National Command Authority (NCA), which has sole authority to launch strategic nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapons are governed by the two-man rule, even at the highest levels in government. Both individuals must concur before a strategic nuclear strike may be ordered. [Emphasis in original.]