Bush Holds Strong on Iraq Despite Damning Report

tee on Wednesday, Thomas Fingar, deputy director of the National Intelligence Council, gave a downbeat assessment of the ability of the Iraqi government to make progress. Dr Fingar said that even if violence diminished, Iraqi leaders would be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation, given the winner-takes-all attitude and sectarian animosities that infect the political scene. Yesterday the Washington Post reported that the CIA director, Michael Hayden, said in November last year that the inability of the Iraqi government to govern seemed irreversible. In a catalog that Mr Hayden gave of the main sources of violence - the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy - al-Qaida came well down the list.

Support for the surge is draining in Washington by the week. Republican members of Congress who once stood by Mr Bush are defecting. The Senate is in the middle of debating a series of motions aimed at constraining the president's hand as commander in chief. They may come to nothing, as not even the Democrat majority want to go for the jugular by voting to cut funding for Mr Bush's extra troops.

The defections and the motions all serve to isolate a president already in retreat. Mr Bush will do well to make it through on his current course to September, when General Petraeus is due to report back to Congress. Few in Iraq believe the situation can be turned around by then. The president's denial about the reality of Iraq stops any progress being made. It also stops policy makers developing a cogent plan for withdrawal. The president will sit out the unfolding disaster until his term of office expires. Insurgents and militias will sit out the unfolding disaster until the Americans leave. The one benchmark certain to be kept is that Iraqi civilians too poor to flee the country will keep on dying.June. "I believe we are making security progress that will enable the political track to succeed as well," he said.

In a further attempt to buy time, Mr Bush said he was sending the Pentagon chief, Robert Gates, and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to the region early next month.

Mr Bush's appeals for more time will win little support on Capitol Hill, where there is growing frustration, even among conservative Republicans, with the White House war strategy.

When the administration's benchmarks for measuring progress in Iraq first surfaced last year they were seen as a way of maintaining pressure on the Iraqi government to achieve realistic goals - while alleviating some of the anxieties of the US public about its commitment to Iraq.

However, with today's report putting many of those goals out of reach, it has become even more difficult for the Bush administration to pursue its present course, and resist demands for a troop withdrawal. The perception that further time would not alter the situation in Iraq was strengthened by a report in the Washington Post today that quoted the CIA director, General Michael Hayden, warning last November that the Iraqi government's failures seemed "irreversible".

Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the foreign relations committee, told reporters: "This progress report is like the guy who's falling from a 100-story building and says halfway down that everything's fine. If we continue the way we're going ... we're headed for a crash landing."

Mr Bush took a conciliatory tone today towards his critics on Capitol Hill, and said he was willing to be flexible on Iraq. He called Republican dissidents "friends of mine". He also acknowledged that Americans were war-weary. "There is a war fatigue in America. It is affecting our psychology," he said. "It's an ugly war."

However, those gestures did not translate into any real change in policy. Mr Bush is unwilling to change strategy until September when General David Petraeus, US commander in the Middle East, and Royan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, are due to report on the war. Until then, he made it clear he would resist any change in course, despite the dissent in Congress.

"I don't think Congress ought to be running the war," he said. "Trying to run a war through resolution is a prescription for failure."