President Bush plans to continue his Iraq troop surge well into next year after a string of positive reports left Democrats increasingly powerless to end the war.

Mr Bush, bolstered by growing public support for the surge and recent admissions from war critics that military gains have been made, has begun a campaign to talk up the strategy before General David Petraeus’s critical progress report next month.

General Petraeus, the US ground commander in Iraq, is expected to tell Congress that military progress is being made and that the surge should be given more time. Mr Bush used his weekly radio address to capitalise on a palpable shift in attitude on Capitol Hill about the war in recent days to state: “Our new strategy is delivering good results, and our commanders recently reported more good news.”

Lee Hamilton, a former Democrat congressman and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group – last year’s bipartisan prescription to end the war – told The Times: “It is inconceivable that General Petraeus will say the surge has failed. So I think we’re going to have a military stay-the-course strategy well into next year.”

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

From accusations that the weapons of mass destruction dossier had been sexed-up to withdrawal of British troops from Basra

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The White House also hopes that even moderate Democrats – particularly the coalition of 47 conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House – will back a continued surge when confronted with a positive assessment by General Petraeus.

James Clyburn, the third-ranked Democrat in the House and a vocal troop withdrawal advocate, admitted that if General Petraeus reported progress it would be a problem for antiwar Democrats.

The White House released a document on Friday called Changing Attitudes on Iraqand cited positive reports from several unexpected sources, and recent polls showing a slight increase in support among Americans for the surge and Mr Bush. Perhaps the most influential assessment seized upon by the White House was an article inThe New York Times on July 30, entitled “A war we might just win”, by two fierce critics of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the conflict.

Just returned from Iraq, Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, of the left-leaning Brookings Institution think-tank, wrote: “Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticised 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.”

A New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 42 per cent of Americans said that taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, up from 35 per cent in May. Now 31 per cent of the US public believe that the surge is making the situation better, up from 22 per cent last month.

Nine months after winning control of Congress with pledges to end US involvement in Iraq, Democrats have failed to pass any significant antiwar legislation. Even if Mr Bush suffers more Republican defections, White House strategists believe that he will continue to hold a veto-proof majority in Congress. Democrats are unlikely to muster the two thirds majority they need in both the House and Senate to override Mr Bush’s promised veto of any legislation demanding a time-tabled withdrawal.

The most that antiwar Democrats can realistically hope for, analysts believe, is for Mr Bush to begin a withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq in the spring. The other reality dawning on Democratic activists is that even the party’s leading presidential candidates have policy positions that will leave US troops in Iraq for years.

Five US troops died in southern Baghdad when a sniper shot and killed a US soldier, then lured his comrades to a booby-trapped house.The soldiers set off a pressure-triggered bomb that killed four and wounded four others. The attack was blamed on al-Qaeda. General Rick Lynch, who commands districts to the south of the Iraqi capital, said that the use of rigged houses was a new tactic. Another US soldier was killed by small-arms fire in a separate attack.

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