More troops.(George W. Bush to send additional troops to Iraq)

THE question of whether we have enough troops in Iraq has been acrimoniously debated throughout the war. We have never considered more troops a cure-all--how you use troops is just as important as their sheer Numbers--but the events of recent weeks have made clear that the U.S. simply needs more manpower on the ground.

The Bush administration has decided to focus on what it calls the Battle of Baghdad, shifting 5,000 additional American troops (on top of the 30,000 already there) to the capital city to address an awful security situation. In this, the administration implicitly concedes that troop levels matter. But is 5,000 additional troops enough? It seems unlikely, given that Baghdad is a sprawling city of nearly 6 million. The idea is to seal the city off, to the extent possible, and to divide it into tightly controlled zones. We Americans will do the initial "sweeping" of the zones, then hand them over for "holding" to Iraqi security forces, which is where it gets dicey. Our experience in Iraq has often been that, as soon as our forces leave a given area, it deteriorates to the point of our having to return, in the dynamic that John McCain has called "whack-a-mole."

In any case, it makes little sense to borrow American troops from other areas in Iraq when they are already too thin on the ground. A Marine intelligence officer recently reported that we are losing in Anbar province and that we could use another division--roughly 15,000 troops--there. The administration dismissed this as just one report. But both the commander in western Iraq and Gen. Pete Chiarelli, the commander of Multinational Corps-Iraq, endorsed this basic assessment (while steering clear of the troop-level question). In general, it ...