CRITICS OF THE PLAN PROPOSED by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iraq Planning Group (IPG) have been pointing to supposed discrepancies in the numbers of troops required to secure Baghdad in my writings, the IPG, and the Bush administration’s statements.
I noted before the IPG met that it would require a surge of 80,000 additional troops to clear the entire Baghdad capital area, according to traditional counter-insurgency norms and under a variety of other unlikely conditions. I did not advocate such an operation. I noted consistently, again before the IPG met, that I thought it would take about 50,000 additional U.S. troops to clear and hold all of Baghdad, but I also noted that we could clear parts of the city with fewer forces in a rational, phased plan.
