DOUBLING DOWN. So Charles Krauthammer, after denigrating the members of the Iraq Study Group and their findings, says he wants us to "'double down' our military effort" in Iraq? ("This means a surge in American troops...") The thought that anyone in the administration listens to this guy is frightening. The time for sending sufficient troops has long since passed. Even though I thought this war was a bad idea, once there, as late as autumn 2004 I still argued for more troops because it was clear that George W. Bush had violated every tenet of the Powell Doctrine, including the most important one: overwhelming force. Later, when I read Paul Bremer's book, I wondered how it is that somebody like me -- with no security clearance and no security adviser -- could figure out from my professor's perch in Baltimore that we had sent an underwhelming force (not in the quality of the troops, but their number). Bremer confirms that the first week he arrived in Baghdad, he was handed a military study showing that previous, successful occupations had one troop per 50 citizens. We had one per 150. He mentioned the report to Donald Rumsfeld, who never got back to Bremer about it. (Rumsfeld, of course, remained defense secretary for another three years, in accordance with this administration's general policy of maintaining an inverse relationship between competence and longevity of service.)
Sorry, Charlie: Just like in blackjack, the time to double-down is before you go bust, ideally when you have 11. What Krauthammer is proposing is doubling down on hard 20. If you try that in Vegas, most dealers will try to stop you, as a matter of courtesy. If you insist, the dealer usually notifies the pit boss, because such behavior is so erratic that the casino thinks you're either cheating in some way or you're a crazy fool.
--Tom Schaller
