Obama To Finally Act: 34,000 Troops To Be Sent? (UPDATED)

If true, this is good news, but I await the outcry from the left:

"Technically, McChrystal had asked for 80,000 troops but that was apparently a “throwaway” number that he never expected to get and wasn’t even the option he himself recommended. What he recommended was 40,000. And he’s going to get something close to that. (McClatchy reported yesterday that the magic number is 34,000.) This is the prudent thing to do, both strategically and politically. Strategically, it’s simply too risky to follow Biden’s counterterror approach by ceding parts of the country to the Taliban and trusting them not to host AQ; if that bet turns out badly, you’re left with an even more dire situation internally and no public will whatsoever to send more troops to deal with it. Politically, an untested president can’t afford not to show some muscle in his first big wartime test, especially if he’s a liberal and especially if he spent the better part of, oh, 18 months explaining why Afghanistan is a must-win. If he pulled out completely, the GOP would destroy him for it. If he sent a token presence, not enough to win but enough to “lose with dignity,” he’d have to explain how that’s worth hundreds or thousands more casualties. And he wouldn’t be able to."
 
Read it all here.

UPDATE: Yes? No? Maybe? Who Knows?