Thoughtful and well-argued comments on the wisdom of sending more troops to Iraq - George Bush is expected to announce an extra 20,000 men and women on Wednesday - dot the blogosphere.
It is an issue that divides not only politicians but also the military.
A US army officer in Iraq, writing at the Badgers Forward blog, is a good place to start. As a company commander in the troubled Sunni Anbar province in western Iraq, Badger 6 fully supports the idea of more troops on the grounds that they deny terrain to the insurgents.
"Enhancing the presence of coalition troops simply acts as a terrain denial tactic. If coalition forces are present, then AIF (anti-Iraqi forces) cannot be present ... The presence of more coalition forces in this sector will help defeat these goals of the AIF. More coalition forces mean that roads will have more presence, more observation, more deterrent effects."
Badger 6 also confronts the argument that more US soldiers will provide more targets.
"It makes it sound as if US troops merely sit around waiting for people to take a shot at them. More US troops also make it so that there are fewer places for the enemy to hide because they come here to do a job, that is securing their sector, not merely acting as targets for the enemy."
Badger 6's view, however, is not shared by some well-known military names. Oliver North, the Marine colonel of Iran-Contra fame - and no dove - says not one of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, national guardsmen or Marines he interviewed in Anbar was in favour of more US troops.
Describing the proposed troop surge as eerily similar to Lyndon Johnson's plan to "save" Vietnam in the 60s, North argues in the conservative weekly Human Events:
"Adding 10,000 or 20,000 more US combat troops - mostly soldiers and Marines - isn't going to improve Iraqi willingness to fight their own fight - an imperative if we are to claim victory in this war."
Writing in the Washington Post, Wesley Clark, who commanded Nato forces during the Kosovo campaign, acknowledges that an increase might bring temporary benefits, but adds:
"But how significant would this be? We've never had enough troops in Iraq. In Kosovo, we had 40,000 troops for a population of two million. That ratio would call for at least 500,000 troops in Iraq; adding 20,000 now seems too little, too late."
In more polemical fashion, John Teague, at The Partisan Blast, seeks to demolish, point by point, the arguments of Frederick Kagan, one of the most vocal advocates of a troop increase.
"On the one hand, Kagan is critical of what he calls the lack of focus on counter-insurgency by US commanders in Iraq, but he also advocates a large conventional military build-up on the other. Seasoned military scholars understand all too well the folly in placing large numbers of conventional ground forces in an area of operation against small, hit-and-run guerrilla forces."
