What the numbers don't tell you is that for every soldier on the ground there are others fulfilling life support roles. Therefore, even if 30,000 more do come to Baghdad, there will probably be less than 10,000 actually in the streets. The biggest priority right now is to deal with the militias. Unfortunately, that means ousting Maliki. His inability or unwillingness to do this (the most obvious cause being his dependency on Moqtada al-Sadr affiliated government members) shows clearly that the present administration in Iraq is not fit to rule this country. Clean out the government and get moderates in, disband the militias and wrest indirect political control from them. Then the additional troops might make a difference.

It is an abiding paradox of contemporary Iraq that the Mahdi Army and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are slaughtering each other daily, but that young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the leader of the Mahdi Army) has a better political relationship with Sunni Arab MPs and leaders than any other Shiite.

I can attest to many "Defense World" conversations that have ended with: "the time may come when we will have to kill millions of Muslims," or, "history shows that to win over a people you have to kill at least 10% of them, like the Romans" (for comparison, we killed or contributed to the death of about 5% of Japan from 1944-46, while Russia has killed at least 8% of the Chechen people).