Is It A Surge....Or Too Little Too Late? Whatever It Is, It Can't Be Both.

An increase of 21, 000 troops into Iraq may not sound like much. But as I previously posted in in one of the comment threads, these troops are going specifically into Baghdad, which only had 4,000 troops. Now that ... is significant.

Our new strategies seem to be having an effect already. To wit:

1. Our navy is establishing a larger, more intimidating presence in the Persian Gulf;
   
2. U.S. forces have been authorized to go after Iranian agitators and radicals capturing (or killing) them;
   
3. We are now disrupting Iran's money network around the globe;
   
4. With Saudi help, oil supplies are stable, inventories up, consequently oil prices have been dropping, adding further strain to Iran's pocketbook;
5. UN sanctions pushed for by the U.S. adding further strain;
   
6. Nouri al-Maliki has finally agreed to go after Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, and already hundreds of his milita captured;
   
7. Iraqi's Parliament has just got done approving (although it was contentious there for awhile) Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's plan for securing Baghdad, giving President Bush's new strategy important legal approval from the Iraqi government.

This is all good. It is being reported, however, that our regime at Foggy Bottom (our oh, so glorious State Dept.) does not want a full out democratic revolution and real regime change. They reportedly want a change of the guards, so to speak, within the present gaggle of mullahs running the government.

Ahmadinejad is losing popularity and could be close to being impeached, and Ayatollah Khamenei, its' Supreme leader, is dying.

"They are terrified of real regime change, so are going along with Bush's military pressure as a way to support a coup engineered by yet another Ayatollah, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani," says Dr. Jack Wheeler.

Rafsanjani served as President of Iran from 1989 to 1997 and is widely recognized as the one who has really has been running Iran for the last 24 years.

So not much would change under that likely scenario. Why our State Dept. would opt for this kind of strategy is rather puzzling.