NON-CLARIFICATION CLARIFICATION

Viceroy Jerry has an op-ed piece in Friday's NYT, in which he states his intention to clarify his recent comments at an insurance convention ("we should've had more troops on the ground"), but if you read it carefully, he doesn't actually clarify a thing.

This is as close as he gets:

It's no secret that during my time in Iraq I had tactical disagreements with others, including military commanders on the ground. Such disagreements among individuals of good will happen all the time, particularly in war and postwar situations. I believe it would have been helpful to have had more troops early on to stop the looting that did so much damage to Iraq's already decrepit infrastructure. The military commanders believed we had enough American troops in Iraq and that having a larger American military presence would have been counterproductive because it would have alienated Iraqis. That was a reasonable point of view, and it may have been right. The truth is that we'll never know.

Other than that, there's tripe about training the Iraqis to defend themselves. That is a worthy and necessary strategy in this effort, but it is not, and should not be mutually exclusive to having enough boots on the ground in the meantime.

From there, Bremer spends the rest of the column erecting a strawman, say that there are those who misconstrue Bremer's comments as lack of support for the effort. Er, no, Democrats, Kerry included, cite you to criticize the President's incompetence in carrying out operations in Iraq, the debate over the decision to or point of going is an entirely different debate.