Britain reinforces as Bush sees long Iraq fight

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON - Washington's closest ally, Britain, announced a reinforcement of some 1,200 soldiers to Iraq as President Bush warned of a long fight ahead on the "central front" of the terror war.

Following a US plea for more non-American troops to counter violence and share the cost of occupying postwar Iraq, London said it would send two more battalions to bring its contingent controlling the south to more than 12,000.

The United States wants to see another 15,000 soldiers from other nations in Iraq to back its 130,000-strong force.

Underlining the dangers involved, two US soldiers were wounded Monday when their convoy struck an explosive device on a Baghdad bridge in the latest of daily attacks.

Earlier, virtually as Bush was addressing Americans in the early hours of Monday Iraqi time, US troops rammed gates, jumped walls and stomped through bedrooms in a raid netting four guerrilla suspects in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

Bush said in his speech that further time and sacrifice were needed in Iraq to beat the "enemies of freedom" in what he termed the "central front" of the U.S.-led war on terror that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He asked Congress for $87 billion for operations in Iraq and elsewhere.

Iraqis and occupying US troops were left wondering just when they would see the back of each other.

"America took a big step toward straightening things out when it got rid of Saddam. But then they destroyed the country," said Baghdad optician Amjad Aqrawi.

"The longer this goes on the more divorced soldiers you are going to see," said Specialist Jeffrey Barnaby at a US base in Tikrit, hometown of ex-dictator Saddam, who has been on the run for five months.

Bush, in a speech Sunday night US time answering criticism at home and around the world of Washington's handling of postwar Iraq, said: "Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there -- and there they must be defeated."

In a news conference Monday, Iraq's US governor, Paul Bremer, said $20 billion of the money Bush mentioned was earmarked for reconstruction in Iraq. "It is a dramatic illustration of the fact that the American people are going to finish the job we started when we liberated Iraq," he said.

Iraq's U.S.-appointed transitional Governing Council faced its first major test in the Arab world Monday when Arab League foreign ministers were to decide whether a council delegate may represent Baghdad at their meeting in Cairo.

Arab states have been loath to fully endorse the body for fear of legitimizing the US occupation of Iraq.

Sixty-seven American and 11 British soldiers -- plus hundreds of Iraqis -- have been killed in combat or cross-fire since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

In the latest bout of lawlessness plaguing Iraq since Saddam's authoritarian rule collapsed, five people were shot dead in an apparent tribal feud in Iraq's second city of Basra, witnesses and hospital sources said Monday.

In the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, in central Iraq, US police were checking for illegal weapons among local militia roaming the streets since the assassination in late August of Shi'ite leader Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, witnesses said.

In his speech, Bush said "a collection of killers ... desperately trying to undermine Iraq's progress and throw the country into chaos" was made up of Saddam loyalists and foreign extremists.

Critics say it was the U.S.-led invasion and occupation that turned Iraq into a close-to-home battleground for anti-American Arab militants.

Washington and London have so far failed to substantiate claims Saddam had ties to al Qaeda -- blamed for the September 2001 attacks -- or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were the formal pretext for war.

Herald Feature: Iraq