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David Weigel | December 16, 2006

Remember this Jim Henley post when you're scanning the news in six months or so.

The government is still mulling ways to scrounge up to 20-30,000 troops to add to the existing forces.

As a reminder, the winter months are when insurgent activity drops, so look for a spate of stories about how “the surge is working” in the early months of 2007. Then look for everything to fall apart again as summer turns toward fall.

One of the real oddities of this war is how quickly the botched predictions of hawks are forgotten when the next roadblock or crisis pops up. Most recently, when violence ticked down in Baghdad four months ago there was a brief flurry of comment on how the generals on the ground had figured this mess out, how the Iraqis were coming into their own, etc and so on. That was just the latest bogus analysis: A year ago the Connecticut for Lieberman Party claimed we could start withdrawing troops by, well, now. These people are always wrong and should not be taken seriously.