Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Senior administration officials said 17,500 troops would go to Baghdad and 4,000 to the volatile Anbar province, with the first wave of troops expected to arrive in five days. Others will come in additional weeks, joining about 130,000 already in Iraq.

The officials said the cost of the troop increase would be around $5.6 billion. An additional $1.2 billion would finance rebuilding and jobs programs with the aim of cutting down on the supply of new recruits for militias.

Many of Bush’s own Republicans expressed unease with the idea of a troop increase, noting that an effort last year to try to stabilize Baghdad by adding troops was followed by more violence.

President Bush will address the nation at 9 p.m. ET. The speech will be shown live on MSNBC Cable and MSNBC.com.
“I don’t know the numbers, but we’ve done 20,000 before,” Sen. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, told CNN. “It has made no difference because the Iraqis whom we have trained have simply not shown up to the fight. This is their fight, it’s not our fight.”

It will be different this time, White House counselor Dan Bartlett responded.