A US progress report on the Iraqi government will show that the country's leaders have failed to meet some benchmarks for political and economic reforms, the White House said Tuesday, according to dpa. With the report to Congress due by Sunday, US President George W Bush reportedly was about to launch a bid to shift the domestic debate toward the prospect of an eventual US troop drawdown as he loses support for his policy within his own Republican ranks. Bush has tried to delay any decisions on Iraq at least until he receives a mid-September report from his top general and the US ambassador in Baghdad. But a string of Republican senators who have defected from his war policy appear to be forcing Bush's hand. The Congress approved legislation earlier this year requiring the Bush administration to report on the Iraqi government's progress on meeting benchmarks by July 15, including political reconciliation aimed at deflating sectarian tension and a crucial oil law to establish rules for sharing revenue among Iraq's ethnic and religious groups. "Some of the benchmarks have been made. Some of them haven't," White House spokesman Tony Snow said, adding "we've got a long way to go" to stabilise Iraq. Snow refused to give details during a round of morning TV talk show interviews. But he said Bush still had no intention to set a deadline for withdrawing US troops. "The president wants to pull troops out when the commanders on the ground think it's appropriate to do so," Snow told CNN. Bush is working on a new public presentation of his Iraq strategy to emphasize that he wants to withdraw at least some troops if conditions on the ground allow, the Washington Post reported. He reportedly planned to lay out his approach Tuesday. Bush ordered more than 20,000 extra troops to Iraq six months ago to quell spiralling sectarian killings, raising the US military presence to about 160,000. Bush urged Americans and Congress to give the "troop surge" time to work and pledged to review the strategy after another congressionally-mandated progress report on stabilizing Iraq due in September by General David Petraeus, the multinational commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. But patience has begun to thin, and Sunday's benchmark report will play a greater role in the political debate than previously expected. Democratic senators Carl Levin, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have already declared Bush's troops surge strategy a failure.
