INCREASING American concern about the conduct of the war in Iraq has forced President George W Bush to sideline some of his domestic priorities in favour of a new public relations drive to bolster confidence in the coalition effort.

Iraq will return to the top of the American political agenda this week when the president delivers the first of several speeches aimed at reversing a damaging slide in his approval ratings.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister, will pay his first visit to the White House as part of a co-ordinated attempt to boost confidence in both Iraq and America.

The president’s move follows complaints in his own party that the public has been misled about the coalition’s difficulties in Iraq. Almost 100 Americans and several hundred Iraqis have died since the beginning of last month despite a claim by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, that the insurgency was in its “last throes”.

There have also been complaints in military circles that the president has recently been more concerned with his proposed reforms to the US pension system — which is supposedly in danger of collapsing by 2047 — than in publicly discussing the effort in Iraq.

“He’s out in the sticks talking about a social security problem that might occur in 2047, and meanwhile the boys in Iraq are getting killed and injured every day,” said one officer. “Don’t you find that a little odd?”

With mid-term elections next year, Republican senators and congressmen have been complaining that continuing deadlock in Iraq will drag their party to defeats that appeared unthinkable after Bush’s re-election last November.

“People are breaking ranks and saying, ‘You know what, things are not hunky-dory’,” said Joseph Crowley, a New York Democrat congressman who was surprised when an initiative he sponsored calling for an exit strategy was supported by 13 Republicans.

Two separate polls last week showed US confidence in the war declining, with Bush’s approval ratings plunging to 42%, the lowest level of his presidency.

A New York Times poll found that only 37% approved of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, with even lower numbers approving of the Republican-dominated Congress. A Gallup poll in USA Today said 59% now believed US troops should begin to withdraw.

In his weekly radio address yesterday, Bush called the war a “vital test” for American security and said there could be no question of a withdrawal. “The mission isn’t easy,” he said. British officials are convinced the White House will resist calls for an artificial exit strategy that imposes a timetable on the coalition effort.

US forces yesterday launched their second offensive in western Iraq in as many days, aimed at clearing insurgents from the Euphrates river valley. Operation Dagger, involving 1,000 US marines and soldiers, was concentrated in a hostile, deserted area west of Baghdad.

Last night the US military reported that about 50 insurgents had been killed in the offensive. It followed Operation Spear launched around the town of Qaim, 12 miles from the Syrian border.

Yet such thrusts have failed significantly to dent insurgent activity, and coalition commanders acknowledged last week they had been unpleasantly surprised by the terrorists’ ability to modify their tactics in response to US military might.

Bush is expected to argue that the insurgents’ terror tactics are aimed at overshadowing the steady progress the coalition is otherwise making in improving Iraqi lives and training local security forces. The president will stress the long-term benefits of succeeding in Iraq and will “accentuate the positive” in at least three speeches in the next two weeks.

Conflicting reports about the readiness and future usefulness of the tens of thousands of Iraqis being trained by the coalition to take over security duties have fuelled concern among Republican officials who see a capable home-grown force as America’s only hope for a dignified withdrawal from Iraq.

“We always accentuated the positive and never prepared the public for the worst,” complained Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator. “People are dying in larger numbers than we thought and the insurgency seems to be growing stronger, not weaker.”

The fact that these words were spoken by a senior Republican is a measure of the challenge facing the president as he seeks to persuade America that it must stick to its task in Iraq.

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