Not Enough Troops

“We” have been arguing about whether we have enough troops in Iraq for several years now and I’ve never taken a position one way or the other. I’ve been inclined, instinctively, to think it’s probably true that we didn’t send enough troops. But people who know a lot more about this than I ever will have made at least half-way decent arguments to the contrary. So I stayed out of it. How am I supposed to know how many hundreds of thousands of troops are the right number? I haven’t done the right homework to be able to argue about it intelligently.
Niall Ferguson, who has done his homework, makes a pretty damning case against Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s troop numbers in The Daily Star. He makes a better case than anyone I’ve seen so far. If there’s a counter-argument to this essay, I’d really like to know what it is.