Iraq Plan: More Than Just More Troops

Apparently, President Bush wants to send more than just additional troops to Iraq. He's looking for a bigger civilian commitment, too. See this excerpt from a piece Sunday in the New York Times previewing Bush's proposal:

The plan also calls for a more than doubling of the “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” relatively small groups of State Department officials empowered to coordinate local reconstruction efforts, chiefly hiring Iraqi companies. For much of the first half of 2006, the State Department was engaged in a bureaucratic dispute with the Defense Department about how these teams would be protected, including exploration of a plan to hire private protective forces that a White House official said “was too expensive.” Now those teams will be expanded and embedded with combat brigades, officials said, in what would amount to the latest effort to demonstrate to Iraqis that the American forces in their midst were not simply occupiers.