Bush in the White House

Washington, Dec. 20: President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the US is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the “stressed” US armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a President who, days before the November elections, declared, “Absolutely, we’re winning.”

In another turnaround, Bush said he has ordered defence secretary Robert M. Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the army and Marine corps, heeding warnings from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill that multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the armed forces toward the breaking point. “We need to reset our military,” said Bush, whose administration had opposed increasing force levels as recently as this summer.

But in a wide-ranging session in the Oval Office, the President said he interpreted the Democratic election victories six weeks ago not as a mandate to bring the US involvement in Iraq to an end but as a call to find new ways to make the mission there succeed. He confirmed that he is considering a short-term surge in troops in Iraq, an option that top generals have resisted out of concern that it would not help.

A substantial military expansion will take years and would not immediately affect the war in Iraq. But it would begin to address the growing alarm among commanders about the state of the armed forces. Although the President offered no specifics, other US officials said the administration is preparing plans to bolster the nation’s permanent active-duty military with as many as 70,000 additional troops.

A force structure expansion would accelerate the already-rising costs of war. The administration is drafting a supplemental request for more than $100 billion in additional funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $70 billion already approved for this fiscal year, according to US officials.

As recently as June, the Bush administration opposed adding more troops because restructuring “is enabling our military to get more war-fighting capability from current end strength”.

But Bush yesterday had changed his mind. “I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the army, the Marines,” he said. “And I talked about this to secretary Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.”