President Bush will attempt to placate hostile Democrats and a sceptical public tomorrow over his controversial plan to escalate the Iraq war by setting the Government in Baghdad a series of tough benchmarks.

In one of the most important speeches of his presidency, televised from the Oval Office, Mr Bush will combine a plan to send 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad with elements from last month’s bipartisan Iraq Study Group report. He will try to sell the idea of a military surge as part of a broader economic and political package.

Mr Bush will seek to convince the Democratic- con-trolled Congress that his plan is as much about shifting responsibility to the Government of the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, as it is about ramping up US military involvement.

Although Mr Bush has rejected the study group’s core proposal — to begin a drawdown of US troops by the beginning of 2008 — he will incorporate other elements that many Democrats and Republicans, and the ten members of the commission, have called for. He will thus be “cherry-picking” from the group’s proposals, a strategy James Baker, its chairman, explicitly warned the President not to do.

But by setting Mr al-Maliki specific goals, Mr Bush is responding to warnings given by a cross-party group of senators that his military plan would otherwise have limited support in Congress. Drawing more Sunnis into the political process and legislation that would fairly distribute Iraqi oil revenue to all regions are among the expected benchmarks.

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