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Iraq war `is lost,' top US lawmaker Harry Reid says

A top US Democratic lawmaker declared on Thursday that the war in Iraq "is lost," pointing to the sustained bloodshed there even as US President George W. Bush urged patience with his strategy.

"This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week," Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters, referring to the US-led security push in Baghdad.

Bush did not directly address Reid's comments, but White House spokeswoman Dana Perino quickly fired back that they were at odds with US military assessments of the two-month-old effort to quell sectarian violence in Iraq.

And "if this is his true feeling, then it makes one wonder if he has the courage of his convictions and therefore will decide to defund the war," the spokeswoman said as the president pleaded for time for his plan to work.

Locked in a bitter weeks-long feud with Democrats in Congress over emergency war funding, Bush said one day after a suicide blasts that killed more than 200 people in Baghdad that no crackdown could ever fully banish such attacks.

"If the definition of success in Iraq -- or anywhere -- is `no suicide bombers,' we'll never be successful," he told a friendly audience at a high school in Tipp City, Ohio.

"I'm optimistic we can succeed. I wouldn't ask families to have their troops there if I didn't think, one, it was necessary, and two, we can succeed. I believe we're going to succeed," he said.

A top military commander, however, warned that al-Qaeda in Iraq would press ahead with its campaign of high profile bombings to defeat US efforts to stabilize Baghdad.

"We should have realistic expectations. These high-profile attacks are going to continue," said Major General Michael Barbero, the Joint Staff's deputy director for regional operations.

Clashes yesterday erupted between gunmen and US and Iraqi forces around a Shiite mosque in western Baghdad just before Friday prayers, witnesses and local media said. The US military said it was looking into the reports.

Meanwhile, US soldiers were building a 5km-long wall to protect a Sunni enclave, Azamiyah, which is surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods and "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said.
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