FREDERICK KAGAN’S article supporting the increase in troops and maintaining their presence in Iraq until the conditions are right for withdrawal — and not until then — is the most sensible piece I’ve read (Send more troops to Baghdad and we’ll have a fighting chance, Comment, December 24).

George W Bush is right. The recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are wrong. Moreover, the suggestion that Iran and Syria’s involvement would contribute to a peaceful solution is risible. What on earth are James Baker and his fellow sages thinking? It would be like Sandringham’s head gamekeeper offering employment to two of East Anglia’s most notorious poachers.

Greg Waggett
Babraham, Cambridgeshire

So, Kagan says that a “surge” of troops into Iraq is necessary, and cites Tal Afar as an example of success in similar circumstances. However, the force ratio to population necessary to replicate this “success” would require 500,000 rather than the 50,000 troops Kagan mentions.

This suggestion comes from a man who claimed in the Los Angeles Times two years ago that the invasion was a strategic success because it effectively ended the US presence in Saudi Arabia, and that although the continued occupation of Iraq “may continue to anger Muslims and Arabs their hostility cannot be compared to the outrage they felt over the large US presence in the birthplace of Islam”.

Given that the recent operational surge in troop levels in Baghdad was an abject failure, why would a nationwide surge be successful? In short, Kagan’s plan is nothing but a recipe for compounding the disaster of the neocons’ policies in Iraq thus far.

Jon Latimer
by e-mail