Bush to Add Troops in Baghdad, Citing 'Terrible' Sectarian Strife

President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki offered a united front on Baghdad. (By Win Mcnamee -- Getty Images)

"It's a new challenge," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said after yesterday's Bush-Maliki meetings. "This isn't about insurgency. This isn't about terror. This is about sectarian violence."

Security analysts said that the administration has not yet figured out a way to deal with the militias and will not get anywhere until it does. "It's clear the Interior Ministry is out of control," said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former adviser to the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq. "Death squads are never acceptable."

Rubin said that when he traveled around Iraq recently, his Iraqi companions were more worried about police checkpoints than anything else. When he asked whether he should show his old Defense Department identification card at a checkpoint, Rubin said, his Iraqi colleagues called it "the execute-me-please-faster card."

Bush and his aides were vague about the new Baghdad security strategy, but the president said it would involve embedding more U.S. military police with Iraqi police units. The combined forces, he said, would secure individual neighborhoods "and gradually expand the security presence as Iraqi citizens help them root out those who instigate violence."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later told reporters he would not discuss how many troops will move to Baghdad. "There are more Iraqi troops that will be going to Baghdad than U.S., but both will be going in in fairly good numbers, more than hundreds," he said. Rumsfeld said that there is "a good deal of violence" in Baghdad and two or three other provinces but that more than a dozen provinces are doing well.

Military officials said the U.S. contingent brought into Baghdad could be as large as a brigade, which would mean 2,000 to 5,000 more troops joining the 30,000 now deployed in the capital area. A reserve force held in Kuwait has already moved largely into Iraq, so officials said additional U.S. forces for Baghdad could come from areas recently passed to Iraqi control, such as Muthanna province in the south or Mosul in the north.

A Pentagon official said four Army military police companies, totaling about 400 soldiers, have been ordered to Baghdad to be embedded with Iraqi police units expected to sweep through the city in coming days. The Pentagon also may prepare a Marine or Army brigade combat team outside Iraq for quick deployment if needed in coming weeks, in part because the reserve force, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, was sent from Jordan to Lebanon last week to help remove U.S. citizens.

Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that pulling U.S. troops from other areas of Iraq could be a gamble but that commanders had no choice, lest they risk losing the capital. "The previous security mission, with Iraqi troops and a limited U.S. force, failed completely," he said, adding that "if they didn't do something and do it quickly, we'd probably see the country collapse into civil war."

In Iraq yesterday, gunmen descended on a group of laborers outside an Iraqi base 50 miles west of Mosul, killing four workers and wounding eight others. A car bomb exploded near a U.S. military patrol in Mosul, missing the patrol but wounding nine people, including two traffic policemen. Also in Mosul, gunmen killed an Iraqi police lieutenant colonel and a customs official.

Staff writer Joshua Partlow in Baghdad and special correspondent Hassan Shammari in Baqubah contributed to this report.