PRESIDENT George W Bush is expected to announce this week that a “surge” of US troops into Iraq will be accompanied by a handover of many provinces to Iraqi government control.

The move is designed to present a plan for “victory” in Iraq, which also contains the promise of an exit strategy. Bush hopes to confound critics of the surge and reassure a sceptical public that decisive action by the US military could lead to troop withdrawals.

Up to 20,000 extra troops will be deployed to pacify Baghdad, the capital, and Anbar province, home to the Sunni insurgency. As the Pentagon recently noted in a report to Congress, the two regions saw 54% of all attacks in Iraq last year.

“Most Iraqi provinces are pretty calm and where they’re not, our presence is probably causing the trouble,” said a senior defence source.

According to Major-General William Caldwell, a military spokesman, all Iraqi army divisions will be under Iraqi command by this summer and all provinces will be under Iraqi control by the autumn. Three Kurdish provinces are likely to be handed over shortly.

Bush’s long-awaited fresh strategy for Iraq, unofficially called A New Way Forward, is expected on Wednesday. It marks the culmination of discussions over Christmas with White House, Pentagon, State Department and intelligence officials.

The strategy is based as much on political as military considerations, according to senior administration officials who believe it is the president’s last chance to stabilise Iraq. The American public is losing patience with the war and Congress is now controlled by the Democrats.

Bush hopes to put on the spot leading Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton who have said they would not necessarily oppose a surge if it were part of a “larger plan” to end the war.

“The accelerated timetable for turning over everything to the Iraqis except Baghdad and Anbar will look like the beginning of a withdrawal,” said Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Virginia.

Bush has told his advisers he wants a plan for victory. “What defines victory?” Goure added. “If most of the country is under Iraqi control, people will start thinking we are not in a quagmire. There is an end in sight.”

The newly empowered Democrats in Congress are refusing to back a surge. Senator Joe Biden, the new chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, may put forward a resolution explicitly opposing an increase in troops. His committee is about to begin three weeks of hearings into the conduct of the war and is expected to give Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, a tough grilling on her strategy this week.

Biden said the surge was simply a means of postponing disaster so the next president would be “the guy landing helicopters inside the green zone taking people off the roof” — a reference to America’s panicky exit from Vietnam at the end of that war.

But Bush hopes to wrong-foot the Democrats by presenting a package of political, military and economic initiatives for Iraq, including billions in aid.

It will be implemented by a fresh national security and diplomatic team, including John Negroponte, the new No 2 at the State Department.

American officials have been studying the example of Operation Sinbad, which is being carried out by the British in Basra. In a spectacular Christmas Day raid, the British military demolished a police station that was said to have fallen under the control of death squads.

In addition to mounting some large military operations, the British have been purging the police and spreading reconstruction money around. “The Americans have been watching our way of doing business,” said a senior British official.

Discussions are continuing at the White House about how much public pressure Bush should put on Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, to meet deadlines for cracking down on sectarian militias and standing up Iraq’s own security forces.

Bush told Maliki by telephone on Thursday: “You show us the will; we will help you.” A senior defence source said Maliki would be set “a lot of conditions. If he’s not prepared to fulfil his part of the bargain, all bets are off”.

The extent of the surge is still being debated at the White House. It is likely to involve the deployment of 9,000 to 20,000 extra troops — significantly fewer than the demand for at least 35,000 servicemen made by Frederick Kagan and General Jack Keane in their influential paper, Choosing Victory, published by the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

“The worst of all worlds would be a short, small surge,” said Senator John McCain, a leading advocate of the plan. “This surge must be significant and sustained; otherwise, don’t do it.”

The extra troops will be found by extending tours of duty, mobilising reservists and bringing forward planned deployments of new forces. The surge is likely to “roll” forward until April or May, the earliest period when large numbers of fresh troops could be sent to Iraq.

Bush is likely to couple his announcement of new forces with a repeat of his pledge last week to increase the size of the US army — a bargaining chip extracted by generals in exchange for their support for a surge.

In a nod to the recommendations of the much-slighted Iraq Study Group, the number of US troops embedded as trainers and advisers with Iraqi forces is also set to double.

The big leap of faith is whether Bush’s strategy will work before Congress and the American public give up on Iraq. A Pentagon source predicted: “He’s got about six months to get it right.”

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