President George W. Bush will call for sending more US troops to Iraq to calm two troubled areas -- Baghdad, where sectarian violence flares daily, and the western Anbar Province, a base of the Sunni insurgency, a Republican senator said. Another GOP lawmaker put the number of additional troops at 20,000.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, one of about 30 lawmakers to discuss Iraq with Bush at the White House on Monday, said the president offered no specifics on how many extra US troops would be involved. The White House remained quiet on the specifics of Bush's revamped strategy for the nearly four-year-old war, saying he would announce them during a speech to the nation at 9pm today.
"There will be surge in those two [areas], but it wasn't clear how much," Hutchison said.
White House officials privately did not dispute her remarks.
According to Republican Senator Gordon Smith, Bush told the senators that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presented him with the plan for a US troop increase several weeks ago when they met in Jordan. Bush indicated to the lawmakers he was willing to send more troops because the Iraqis were willing to meet certain criteria.
Smith said the president only hypothetically discussed increasing troop numbers by specific amounts, "but it was clear to me a decision has been made for 20,000 additional troops."
There are about 140,000 troops in Iraq now.
Military officials have said Bush is considering sending two to five more brigades -- between about 8,000 and 20,000 troops -- to Iraq, to fight alongside promised additions of Iraqi security forces as well. Some military officials familiar with the discussions say the president could initially dispatch 8,000 to 10,000 new troops to Baghdad, and possibly to troubled Anbar Province, and leave himself the option of sending more later.
The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 members of the US military and was a major factor in the Republican Party losing control of Congress in the November election. Some top military officials worry that sending more troops would overly strain the armed forces without assurances of success.
A central aim of the long-awaited address is to explain why success in Iraq matters to the average person. The White House knows the public is weary of war.
An intense campaign for the plan's rollout will unfold the day after the speech, beginning with a White House ceremony to give the Medal of Honor posthumously to Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, who was killed in 2004 after covering a grenade with his helmet.
And the day after Bush's speech, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are due on Capitol Hill for tough questioning on the president's policies at hearings convened by the Democrats.
Presidential spokesman Tony Snow noted some military officials have said that a troop increase, done right, could help calm violence-torn Baghdad.
Plane crash
Meanwhile, 30 people were killed and two others were injured when a Moldova-registered plane, en route from Turkey to Iraq, crashed in bad weather near Baghdad yesterday, a Turkish government official said.
"According to the preliminary information we have, 30 people died and two others were injured when the plane crashed," an official from the Turkish foreign ministry's press service said.
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