More By: Mark W Adams

My dad cracked me up a few months after I got married. Noting that we were trying to make a baby, he told me that if we were having trouble do what they always did at work when falling behind schedule -- put more men on the job.

Yeah, I get a lot of my sense of humor from Dad.

Anyway, that seems to be the theme of Andrew Bacevich's critique of General Patraeus in American Conservative, 'Sycophant Savior', which is excerpted by Digby. Here's what stood out for me:

What then should he have recommended to the Congress and the president? That is, if the commitment of a modest increment of additional forces —the 30,000 troops comprising the surge, now employed in accordance with sound counterinsurgency doctrine —has begun to turn things around, then what should the senior field commander be asking for next?

A single word suffices to answer that question: more. More time. More money. And above all, more troops.

The idea of course being that if Petraeus was not being a disingenuous tool of the Administration, he would press the advantage instead of recommending the politically convenient policy already determined by the White House at the beginning of the year, an agonizingly slow reduction of troops in theater necessitated by man power dictates to the levels we saw at the beginning of the surge -- a number always considered inadequate for pacification of the country, but large enough that their presence is a constant irritant and cause for discord and resentment among the population.

This of course presupposes that the General wasn't blowing smoke in the first place.

What's strange, almost counterintuitive is Digby highlighting this failed Rumsfeldian strategy of fighting war on the cheap as supporting the anti-war movement. We want less, not more. In a choice between more troops, cash and death, I'm pretty sure Digby and the rest of the Reality Based Community are opting for "none of the above," but we'll settle for less blood on our hands for now.

Digby's playing a dangerous game, a slippery slope indeed when you adopt the argument of an administration critic who advocates for an even larger escalation to make your case for getting out of the country altogether. It's not enough that Bush and Petraeus are wrong, but we have to be right too. It's long past time when it was politically possible, at least for this President, to put together a coalition of half a million "peacekeepers," and double if not triple our own commitment to Iraq. His father had that ability, not so much the Son of a Bush. The political fallout of increasing the military to the size required, no doubt contemplating a draft, is inconceivable. Even without a draft it's a budget buster.

That doesn't mean our next President won't try that policy -- and based on her hawkish record, I think that's exactly what Hillary might try and do. No Republican candidate would get to first base with this, nor would any of them try. No other Democrat would dream of doing it.

But Hillary? Oh yeah. She'd give it a shot. She's the only one who could get away with it.