Cheney Talks Up Iraq 'progress' Ahead of Report

A looming report on Iraq will show "significant progress" in the war, the US vice-president predicted last night, even though president George Bush has refused to speculate on its conclusions.

Dick Cheney, speaking on CNN's Larry King show, said: "The reports I'm hearing from people whose views I respect indicate that the Petraeus plan is in fact producing results. Now, admittedly, I've been on one side of this argument from the beginning."

The September report from General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, will assess the impact of Mr Bush's "surge" strategy, which began in February.

The evaluation is expected to shape the administration's next move in the war, including decisions on how many US troops will stay in Iraq and for how long.

The White House has been speaking of signs of progress since Mr Bush decided to send an extra 30,000 to Iraq, but the president has been careful not to anticipate what Gen Petraeus will say in September. The current US troop strength is about 160,000.

"I don't want to prejudge what David is going to say," Mr Bush told reporters on Monday at a joint press conference with the British prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Mr Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defence, pushed hard for the war on Iraq after the al-Qaida September 11 attacks on the US. Mr Cheney famously predicted that the Iraqis "will welcome us as liberators".

The vice-president's bullish remarks on Iraq followed a much-discussed article in the New York Times this week, from two previous critics of the administration's Iraq policy.

Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack from the centrist Washington thinktank, The Brookings Institution, said the US was finally getting somewhere in Iraq.

"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with," the two wrote after an eight-day visit to Iraq.

While acknowledging that the surge could not go on forever, the analysts said there was "enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008".

Congressional Democrats have been pushing for a troop withdrawal to begin this year. Last month, Republican senators blocked a Democratic attempt to pull out US combat troops from Iraq within 120 days. More than 3,600 US troops have died in the Iraq war, which has become increasingly unpopular with the American public.