President Grasps at Duo's Promise of Victory in Iraq

In the days before Christmas, soon after the Iraq Study Group delivered a report that was essentially a repudiation of George Bush's presidency, the White House invited a retired army vice-chief of staff, General Jack Keane, and four other outside advisers to give a briefing on the war. The meeting was hailed in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the house organ of America's conservatives, for presenting the president with "an actual plan for victory in Iraq, one that is likely to be implemented", but it received very little attention anywhere else.

That plan was the one Mr Bush unveiled on Wednesday night to send 21,500 extra forces to Iraq, and to adjust the focus of their mission, making the security of ordinary Iraqis their main priority. It was produced by Gen Keane, and a neoconservative scholar, Fredrick Kagan, who has been calling for more troops for Iraq for months.

In the world of Washington thinktanks, that gives Mr Kagan and Gen Keane the status of celebrities, and when the duo presented their ideas in a paper called Choosing Victory at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on January 5, the event was packed.

The paper, which begins by chiding Americans for not seeing victory in Iraq as more of a national priority, says the US military made a fatal mistake early on by failing to devote enough resources to protecting ordinary Iraqis. But, it says: "Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort."

Mr Kagan, 36, taught military history at West Point before coming to the AEI, which is known for its close connections to the Bush administration. The son and younger brother of prominent neocons - his father teaches at Yale and his brother is the founder of another conservative thinktank - he also writes regularly for the Weekly Standard.

Administration officials have been coy on a central part of the Kagan-Keane plan - that an increase in troops has to be, in their words, "long and large", lasting for at least 18 months.

"Of all the surge options out there, short ones are the most dangerous," the duo warned in a piece in the Washington Post last December. "Increasing troop levels in Baghdad for three or six months would virtually ensure defeat." That is one recommendation that has been given very little attention this week.