Justin Rood December 9, 2006, 9:41 AM

In an interview with Congressional Quarterly, incoming House intelligence committee chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) said he could support boosting American troop levels in Iraq by 30,000 to subdue the warring militias — though it’s not clear he understands who’s fighting who, or how more troops would get them to stop:

… Reyes says he favors sending more troops [to Iraq].

“If it’s going to target the militias and eliminate them, I think that’s a worthwhile investment,” he said.

It’s hard to find anybody in Iraq who thinks the U.S. can do that.

On “a temporary basis, I’m willing to ramp them up by twenty or thirty thousand … for, I don’t know, two months, four months, six months — but certainly that would be an exception,” Reyes said.

Despite this commitment, Reyes was hard-pressed to explain to CQ’s national security editor Jeff Stein some of the basics of the region’s radicalism, such as whether al Qaeda was Sunni or Shia (answer: very Sunni), and Stein seems nonplussed by the scope of Reyes’ understanding of the many factions fighting the country’s civil war.

Iraq, Silvestre Reyes