President Bush's speech may be scheduled for tonight, but the troop surge in Iraq is already under way.

ABC News has learned that the "surge" Bush is expected to announce in a prime time speech tonight has already begun. Ninety advance troops from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad Wednesday.

An additional battalion of roughly 800 troops from the same division are expected to arrive in Baghdad Thursday. Eighty percent of the sectarian violence occurs within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad, so that is where most of the additional troops will be concentrated.

Oil ministers are today expected to continue yesterday's frenzied round of telephone calls after the price fell below $54 a barrel, triggered by mild weather, particularly in the US.

The oil markets initially shrugged off an escalation of an oil pipeline dispute between Russia and Belarus, and some OPEC members fear that the price will fall further unless the organisation agrees to cut production.

Eighty-four percent of Americans clearly support being in Iraq for a minimum of one more year. Now forget the word surge that has been bandied about. The word in itself means nothing.

Ask yourself this, with a baseline of 84% supporting a continued presence in Iraq for a minimum of a year, what do you suppose they would say if you asked:

Given your support for one more year of war in Iraq, what would you say if military commanders felt a relatively small increase in troops could reduce the commitment to ten months and save American and Iraqi lives?

The bottom line is clear. WHETHER the United States enters war or CONTINUES at war is the exclusive decision of the Congress. Bt the CONDUCT of that specific war, subject to Congress power of military rulemaking (on torture, the UCMJ, the Geneva Conventions, etc.), belongs exclusively to the President.

The Congress' power here seems clear to me. IT can END the Iraq war. But it can not dictate how it is conducted on military questions. That power belongs to the President.

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.

The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.

Announcements on Iraqi TV last night said that the cleric will force every man in Sadr City between 15 and 45 to join his militia.

Sadr supporters believe they will be targeted by U.S. and Iraqi government troops after President Bush unveils his new Iraq strategy Wednesday night. The Mahdi Army is rumored to be distributing grenades to every family in Sadr City, a district already brimming with weapons.

Israel may have over-reacted in July and selected targets (the milk factory, bridges in the north, etc.) that should not have been hit. But the stark scene on the hill of Maroun al-Ras demonstrated that the Israeli military did not bomb indiscriminately as many have claimed. Unlike Hezbollah, the Israelis are able to hit what they want and they don’t shoot at everything. That mosque wouldn’t be standing if they dropped bombs and artillery randomly in the villages.

“My mother is from Deir Mimas,” Said said. “In July Hezbollah brought their weapons out of the caves and valleys and into the village. My family has a small house there that was burned during the war.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Eh,” Said said. “It’s okay. It is fixed now. Anyway, at first Hezbollah fired their missiles from groves of olive trees. Then they got hit by the Israelis. So they moved into Deir Mimas because the other nearby option was Kfar Kila. Hezbollah didn’t want the Shia villages hit, so they moved into Christian villages instead.”

That sounded right. I recently saw Kfar Kila from the Israeli side. The town is literally right on the border, only twenty feet or so from the fence next to the Israeli town of Metulla. I saw no damage whatsoever in Kfar Kila – and this was one day before the end of the war – but I did hear machine gun fire in the streets ominously close to where I was standing.

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