PRESIDENT BUSH sought last night to highlight the success of the Iraqi elections, after a weekend in which he and the White House were consumed by controversy over a secret domestic spying programme.

In a prime-time national address, his first from the Oval Office since he announced the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Mr Bush admitted that the election would not end violence, but said it heralded the "beginning of something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East".

The President also denied that the US would pull out: "Some look at the challenges in Iraq, and conclude that the war is lost. I don’t believe that."

However, Mr Bush was facing a raging controversy at home over his prosecution of the War on Terror. The weekend was dominated by the revelation, and the subsequent surprise televised admission by Mr Bush, that he authorised an eavesdropping campaign on people within the US that bypassed legal requirements.

On a day when the White House had hoped to focus on elections in Iraq, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, appeared on a series of talk shows to defend the spying programme, as Democrats accused the Bush Administration of governing like "Big Brother".

A clearly angry and unapologetic Mr Bush said on Saturday that he had authorised the secret monitoring of phone calls and e-mails because it was "critical to saving American lives".

In an extraordinary move, Mr Bush scrapped a recorded version of his weekly radio address and delivered a live speech in which he aggressively defended his decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on thousands of people without judicial oversight. He also rebuked senators for blocking the renewal of the USA Patriot Act. The Senate vote on Friday, and the row over spying, reflected the growing influence of civil- liberty concerns on Capitol Hill over anti-terror laws and a backlash against the broad powers Mr Bush says he needs to prosecute the War on Terror.

In the past month Mr Bush has faced uncomfortable questions about secret CIA prisons and was forced last week, after weeks of opposition, to back a new law explicitly banning the torture of US terror suspects.

Harry Reid, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, said: "We have to make sure Big Brother doesn’t take over this country."

Dr Rice said: "We don’t ever want to be caught again in the situation where [September 11 hijackers] in San Diego were communicating with terrorists outside the country and we didn’t know about it."

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