WASHINGTON – President Bush will call for sending more American troops to Iraq to calm two troubled areas – Baghdad, where sectarian violence flares daily, and the western Anbar province, a base of the Sunni insurgency, Republican senators said Monday.
Bush did not detail the proposal he will lay out in his televised speech at 6 p.m PST Wednesday, according to senators who discussed Iraq with Bush at the White House on Monday.
But Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., said the president appeared to be planning to send 20,000 additional troops.
“It was clear to me that a decision was made for a surge of 20,000 additional troops,” said Smith, who also serves on the Armed Services Committee. “He did not affirm that that would be the number, but he said roughly … that amount. I understood it as a hypothetical.”
The White House remained mum on the specifics of Bush’s revamped strategy for the nearly four-year-old war, saying he would announce them during his Wednesday speech.
“There will be a surge in those two (areas of Iraq), but it wasn’t clear how much,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
Military officials have said Bush is considering sending two to five more brigades – between about 8,000 and 20,000 troops – to Iraq, to fight alongside promised additions of Iraqi security forces as well. Some military officials familiar with the discussions say the president could initially dispatch 8,000 to 10,000 new troops to Baghdad, and possibly to troubled Anbar province, and leave himself the option of sending more later.
There are about 140,000 troops in Iraq now.
In addition to the troop increase, Bush is likely to call for the Shiite-led Iraqi government to take certain steps, such as reining in Shiite militias that have terrorized the Sunni minority, particularly in Baghdad. Bush also wants the Iraqi leadership to make the political process more attractive to Sunnis by enacting a plan to distribute oil revenues and easing the government’s policies toward members of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
The military escalation is expected to be accompanied by short- and long-term jobs programs. Also on Bush’s agenda is a renewed effort to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Bush will talk in broad terms about the cost of such efforts, with more specific budget numbers to be fleshed out later, Bush spokesman Tony Snow said.
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