The White House hit back on Tuesday in a bid to stem a growing Republican revolt over Iraq strategy, as Democrats drove home a searing attack on President George Bush over the war.
The president’s spokesperson, Tony Snow, pushed back against reports Iraq would meet no benchmarks on political and military progress in an interim assessment due later this week on the state of the United States troop-surge strategy.
As a new poll found that seven in 10 Americans now wanted nearly all US troops out of Iraq by April, the Washington Post reported Bush would signal his intent to cut US force strength by next year if security conditions improve.
Snow rejected a ”gloom and doom” mood settling over Washington on the effort to surge 30 000 troops into Iraq, which has only recently reached its peak.
”The Iraqis and the US forces have met some benchmarks and they haven’t met others at the starting point here,” said Snow on NBC as part of a flurry of television appearances.
Benchmarks include targets for the Iraqi government on stemming sectarian violence, sharing out oil revenues fairly and requirements for political reconciliation between Iraq’s ethnic and religious factions.
Heavy hitters in the US foreign policy establishment have been in Washington this week working on the report. Defence Secretary Robert Gates cancelled a trip to Latin America to remain in the US capital.
Snow gave a hint into the deliberations, saying on NBC that as he assesses Iraq’s adherence to benchmarks, US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker would ”try to find even more nuanced ways of trying to measure success”.
Another senior official said, on condition of anonymity: ”The report to be issued by Sunday will present a picture of satisfactory progress on some benchmarks and not on others.”
”This is to be expected given the report is a preliminary snapshot of what are the early stages of the full surge,” the official said.
As Bush prepared to address the rising discontent in the war, possibly as early as Tuesday in a speech in Ohio, a top official told the Post the beleaguered US leader was aware of public anxiety.
”Look, the president understands the American people are frustrated,” a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the paper.
The US Senate was expected to shortly start voting on a string of amendments to a defence policy Bill, due to include attempts to limit troop numbers and establish firm withdrawal dates which Bush has always rejected.
Republicans in the Senate have so far fended off attempts to handcuff Bush’s war powers by Democratic leaders, who have demanded most combat troops be withdrawn from Iraq by April 1 2008.
A poll released Tuesday showed opposition to the war mounting while Bush’s approval rating fell to a new low.
Seven in 10 Americans favour removing nearly all US troops from Iraq by April, said the USA Today/Gallup poll. And 62% of those surveyed over the weekend said the US had made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq — the first time that figure exceeded 60%, the USA Today newspaper said.
Only one in five said an increase of up to 30 000 US troops in Iraq starting in January had improved the situation while half said Bush’s ”surge” strategy had made no difference. As for the US president, his approval rating dropped to 29%, down from 33% in June.
After a handful of veteran Republicans recently broke with Bush over the war, Senator John Warner, a closely watched party elder statesmen, said he would not announce his position on various Senate measures aimed at changing Iraq strategy until he had heard from Bush, but hoped the president would address the American people directly.
Several other Republicans said they now believed it was time to change course.
”We have to move from non-binding [action] to a binding approach in changing our strategy in Iraq,” Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine told reporters.
Democratic Senator Jack Reed said after returning from Iraq, and a meeting with General David Petraeus, that the US commander could make a definitive assessment of Iraq strategy before an already set date of September. — Sapa-AFP