US President George W. Bush has announced his new strategy on Iraq, but many people are doubtful whether his new plan would work and achieve what it is intended for.

After months of deliberations, Bush outlined his new strategy on Iraq in a television prime-time address Wednesday night, which included political, economic, military, and diplomatic steps for the United States to "succeed" in Iraq, but a centerpiece of his plan -- sending 215,000 more US soldiers to Iraq -- immediately drew fire from Democrats and some Republicans.

"While we all want to see a stable and peaceful Iraq, many current and former senior military leaders have made clear that sending more American combat troops does not advance that goal," warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders in a statement.

Some Republicans, including Senators Gordon Smith, Susan Collins and Sam Brownback, have also expressed opposition to sending more troops to Baghdad.

Current and former US military officials warned that the proposed surge of American troops in Iraq might touch off a more dangerous phase of the war.

"There will be more violence than usual because of the surge, and a surge with more casualties plays up on the international stage," a senior Army official told The Washington Post.

Even the president himself predicted in his speech that it would be a "bloody" year in 2007.

"The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent," he said.

He forewarned the American public that even if the new strategy worked exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence would continue and more Iraqi and American casualties should be expected.

"The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve," the president said.
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By stepping up US military presence in Iraq, Bush was not only inviting a clash with the Democrats who now controlled Congress, he was also ignoring the results of the November elections in which the unpopular war helped the Democrats retake control of the legislature, rejecting the central recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, analysts said.

"It's more than a risk, it's a riverboat gamble," said Leon E. Panetta, a Democratic member of the Iraq Study Group.

Panetta said under the US system, there was no question the president was able to deploy the troops and Congress was unable to stop him.

"But he's going to face so many battles over these next few months, on funding for the war, on every decision he makes, that he's basically taking the nation into another nightmare of conflict over a war that no one sees any end to," he said.

With the majority of Americans opposed to Bush's call to send more US troops to Iraq, Democratic leaders planned to bring nonbinding resolutions to a vote in the Senate and the House that would express opposition to any troop build-up, and observers said Democrats could try to tie Bush's hands by setting conditions on the use of tax dollars.
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"Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States," Bush warned the American public in his address.

The disaster was Bush's war and he had already failed, an editorial published by The New York Times on Thursday said.

The Iraq war "has reached the point that merely prolonging it could make a bad ending even worse," and "without a real plan to bring it to a close ... There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq," the article said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 12, 2007)