Sources say that during a closed meeting, battalion commanders told Senator John Warner, Carl Levin, and Mark Dayton that troop levels in Iraq are not high enough to defeat the insurgency, according to
a report in Time magazine. Moreover, despite Rumsfeld's claim (and that of the Bush administration in general) that they would send in more troops if necessary, they had repeatedly asked for more and gotten rebuffed.
Ol' Sully feels that this helps bolster his belief that the failure to put more troops on the ground in Iraq early on was a tremendous strategic blunder.
However, the problem, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, is that it assumes that there were more troops to be had, that we had the number of troops required to pacify Iraq. (btw, Yggy comments on the report here).
That is all.
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