There's been a debate on the progressive blogs about whether we should be eschew the administration's favored word "surge" in favor of the more appropriate and (let's be honest) more charged term 'escalation'. The new member of TPMCafe's America Abroad blog, political Islam scholar Vali Nasr, now weighs in on why 'escalation' is the only appropriate word for what we're discussing. The new troops aren't going there to quell the violence; they're being sent to go to war with and destroy al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Good policy or bad, the only word for that is escalation. Take a look.