Bush, Maliki to consider adding troops in Baghdad

WASHINGTON, July 24: President George W Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will consider adding more US and Iraqi troops in Baghdad and other ways to counter surging violence when they meet at the White House tomorrow.

Bush and Maliki will consider new approaches to quelling the bloodshed in and around the capital after Maliki's security plan for the region proved a disastrous failure.

''One of the first challenges, obviously, is to go ahead and find an effective way to secure Baghdad,'' said White House spokesman Tony Snow.

Senior Bush administration officials said one option to was to move more US and Iraqi troops into Baghdad from different parts of the country.

''The situation in Baghdad is one that if there starts to be improvement in that city, that will have positive reverberations throughout the country,'' one official said.

Bush is under political pressure to show progress in Iraq, clearing the way for a reduction in US troops by the end of the year, as his Republicans face elections in November with their control of the US Congress at stake.

''Iraq is still the prism which every American voter looks through when thinking about politics,'' said Republican strategist Scott Reed. He said although voters were also worried about high US gas prices and illegal immigration, ''Iraq is still front and center.'' Bush and Maliki were also expected to discuss the Iraqi leader's strong condemnation of Israel's attacks in Lebanon, one of the only issues that has united Iraq's warring factions. US officials haracterize his sharp criticism, which differs from the US approach, as a sign of a healthy democracy.

CIVIL WAR

While the Bush administration insists civil war has not broken out in Iraq, Democrats disagree. ''There is a civil war in Iraq... In the last two months more than 6,000 Iraqis have been killed. It is averaging more than a hundred a day being killed in Iraq. We need to make sure there is a debate on this,'' said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

Bush is fighting to maintain Americans' support for the troops, keep up troop morale and urge patience from a public weary of the three-year-old conflict.

He visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center today to attend a ceremony for three wounded US military service personnel to become American citizens.

''I want our troops to understand that not only does the country support them but we'll win. It's in our national interest that we win. And we will,'' Bush told recently returned military service personnel in Aurora, Colorado, on Friday.

Maliki's emergence to power prompted Bush to make a surprise visit to Baghdad June 13 and, along with the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, spawned hopes among Americans that things were changing for the better.

But with Sunni-Shiite violence claiming hundreds of lives in the weeks since, analysts see Iraq getting worse with violence among Shiite groups rising as well as Shiite-versus-Sunni bloodshed.

Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the violence ''soft ethnic cleansing'' and said that violence was spreading beyond Baghdad to other cities.

''These trends strongly argue that the Iraqi government and US are now losing, not winning,'' he said. ''They are scarcely based on firm data, however, and they scarcely mean the struggle is lost.

What they do mean is that the Maliki government must act far more quickly and decisively.''

REUTERS