WILL: Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

The question of whether an actual troop request was made with any sense of urgency is not clear to me. The fact that one is being made by McChrystal - and whether it's 40,000 or whether the 40,000 represents a negotiated down from 80,000 request is something that I don't know and we should know after careful, protracted deliberation.

PODESTA: I think that the deliberation that's going on is actually exemplary, and I completely agree with George on this. It seems that the Bush administration, for eight months, did sit on Gen. McKiernan's request for more troops, which Obama -

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that's because the troops just weren't there. It wasn't the President saying, "I'm not going to do this if the troops are there." They just didn't have them.

PODESTA: Well, I don't know, I never heard Vice President Cheney going off and giving a speech assaulting President Bush for not acting on those requests at that time. And they did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

So they handed him off a problem, and it's a deep and difficult one, and I think he's doing the appropriate thing by taking his time before he commits to not what looks to be surge, but what looks to be something that would commit the United States to these high troop levels for a very long time in Afghanistan.