Troop Surge -- No!

The polls say No! An already unpopular President can't get Americans to buy into his plans for a troop escalation. I'm not surprised. Now to be upfront, I didn't watch the speech. But the polling is interesting. It appears that in two different polls, one by CBS and the other by the Washington Post, it's just about 2 to 1 against.

CBS Poll: 31% for, 63 % against (interestingly 32% of Republicans say no)
WP Poll: 36% for, 61% against (here the glaring stat is the 94% of Dems that say no).

Though the Democrats will take the lead in resisting the president, I think it's appropriate to note that Republicans from moderate Chuck Hagel to arch conservative Sam Brownback have broken with the President. Brownback, of course, is running for President, but this is really damning of what has happened in Iraq.

“I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer,” said Brownback. “Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution. In the last two days, I have met with Prime Minister Maliki, with two deputy presidents and the president of the Kurdish region. I came away from these meetings convinced that the United States should not increase its involvement until Sunnis and Shi'a are more willing to cooperate with each other instead of shooting at each other.”

This isn't a left-right thing any more, in fact it's not a Republican-Democrat thing. It's a recognition that this thing is so broken that throwing more troops won't fix it. If we'd have put in in overwhelming force in the beginning (Powell Doctrine) this may have worked, but we didn't and now we're paying for it with lives and tax dollars.

In the end, unless this proves to be a miraculous solution, John McCain's presidential ambitions will go down with the President's policies. I'm no Brownback fan, but this thing requires political solutions, not more troops.