The strategy for Baghdad unfolds:

The Bush administration’s announcement on Tuesday that it will shift more forces to Baghdad is much more than a numbers game. It reflects a new strategy to reclaim control of the Iraqi capital and a new approach for deploying the troops.

The plan is to concentrate on specific neighborhoods rather than distribute the forces throughout the city, control movement in and out of sectors of the capital and try to sweep them of insurgents and violent militias.

In effect, the scheme is a version of the “ink blot” counterinsurgency strategy of grabbing a piece of terrain, stabilizing it and gradually expanding it. Only this time the objective is not a far-flung Iraqi city or town, but the capital, the seat of the fledgling government and home to some seven million Iraqis.

The plan has risks. It will divert American military police from deploying to Anbar Province, where the insurgency continues to rage. And an increased presence of American troops on the ground in Baghdad, where insurgent attacks have soared, carries the potential of more American casualties.

But Baghdad in military parlance is the “center of gravity” for the larger effort to secure the country.

Restoring security in a capital that is tormented by sectarian strife and lawless militias is such an essential task that American commanders are willing to accept a greater degree of risk elsewhere.

Sending in additional troops is an implicit acknowledgment of what every Iraqi in Baghdad already knows: Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s original Baghdad security plan has failed.

In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel.

The additional American forces sent here will include units equipped with Stryker armored vehicles, military police and, essentially, what is left of the American military’s reserve in Kuwait.

In order to effect this plan, forces may be delayed from leaving Iraq:

As has been done periodically during the 3-year-old war, the military would temporarily increase the size of the U.S. force by extending the overlap between newly arriving units and those leaving.

One defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been announced, said the idea would be to create “a momentary overlap of at least a brigade” — meaning roughly 3,500 troops. Another official said the increase might be “from the low 3,000s to the high 4,000s.”