Harry Reid has been getting a lot of flack from liberal blogs for his backing of a "surge" of an additional 20,000 troops. Reid's predicament is an old one: the Democrat does not want to be cornered into being "soft on defense". But what no Dem strategist seems to have figured out is that there is a way of getting out of the current Dem Iraq dilemma: how do you get our troops home without appearing to be soft on defense? The solution is to present Bush with his own dilemma.

One of the main stories recently has been how Bush refuses to accept the main recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. But the mainstream press has ignored what is more significant: that the ISG group agrees with Bush—and hence disagrees with the majority of the American people—on a fundamental strategic issue: the US must maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq.

I thought I would use my first diary at MyDD to introduce readers to a very informative Web site—TomDispatch—which has an article that makes this very clear.