On the surge in Baghdad - preview of President Bush's speech tonight

Powerline participated in a conference call this afternoon with White House press secretary Tony Snow, who outlined the President's plan for the "surge" in Iraq. I've been skeptical of the surge plan before, believing that the problem is not so much how many troops we have, but how they are deployed and their rules of engagement. Snow's description of the plan reassures me a great deal. From the Powerline summary of the call:

Essentially, the president plans to send an additional 20,000 troops or so troops to Baghdad and about 4,000 additional troops to Anbar province. Baghdad will be divided into nine districts. We will station one batallion (about 600 troops) in each district. The Iraqis will station one brigade (a larger unit) in each. We will have a presence in the neighborhoods on a 24/7 basis. This is a switch from the approach we've been using, under which we roll our folks into the neighborhoods in the morning and return them to their barracks at night.

The rules of engagement will allow us to go after everyone we need to go after. The Mahdi army, for example, will not be off limits. Snow pointed to statements from Iraq's president confirming that the Iraqi government is on board with this.

In Anbar, our additional forces will try to consolidate recent gains. According to Snow, tribal leaders there have turned strongly against al Qaeda, and want us to send in more forces with which to rout them. President Bush will oblige.

The most important point is the ability to go after Mahdi Army troops. Hopefully, the decision of which militia forces to target will be largely left to local commanders on the scene, without the need for approval from political people to authorize actions against certain forces.

Baghdad is 78 square miles. That's 600 U.S. soldiers per 8.6 square miles, or almost 70 soldiers per square mile. Those are average figures, as the population density varies, and I would expect the 9 districts to vary in geographic size, with smaller districts in the areas of greatest unrest or highest population density. Still, that's a hefty number of soldiers in each area, and should be enough in that concentrated area to make a real difference.

It appears that the plan has some support for the very respected Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. I've said several times before in discussions over at Centerfield that maintaining al-Sistani's at least tacit support for our actions is crucial to success among the Shia in Iraq, and that maintaining that support may very well be why we didn't go after al-Sadr earlier. I suspect that al-Sadr's abuses and violence have finally convinced al-Sistani to abandon support for him.

If that's the president's plan, then I support it, and I hope it does the job. I am cautiously optimistic.

LAST MINUTE ADDITION: I've just found the President's outline of The New Way Forward in Iraq. I'll be looking over it when I get home from work, and hope to post later on it.