IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO THIS KIND OF THING, I SUPPOSE YOU SHOULD DO IT RIGHT

I can't help noticing that Turkey is massing as many as 100,000 troops on the border with Iraq. That's to fight a border war with the PKK -- which, Turkey estimates, has 3,000 rebels in Iraq.

Right now we have 165,000 troops in Iraq (plus a handful of troops from other countries). A year ago, our pals at the Brookings Institution estimated that there were 25,000 insurgents in Iraq, plus 1,350 foreign fighters. That number is nearly nine times the size of Turkey's estimate of PKK fighters in Iraq. And America isn't just fighting a border war -- it's trying to stabilize Iraq and quell a civil war (involving, per Brookings, 50,000 members of Shiite militias). Oh, and in 2005, the head of the Iraqi intelligence services said there were actually 200,000 people in the Iraqi resistance.

Think maybe our troop numbers have been a tad low? Think maybe, if you insist on fighting a war in this region, you should do it the way the Turks are doing it?