Bush Is Said to Approve More Aid to Iraqi Sunnis Battling Extremist Groups

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — President Bush, marshaling his arguments to maintain current troop levels in Iraq, has approved the acceleration of a new program to intensify economic assistance directly to Sunni Arab regions where former insurgents have joined American forces in fighting extremist Sunni groups, senior American officials say.

The move, which has been gathering momentum for several months, was discussed at length on Friday at a Pentagon session attended by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior American commanders in Iraq, the officials said.

The shift is focused on Anbar Province, once a hotbed of attacks on American forces, where local Sunni militias have now turned against the homegrown insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and its allies and are increasingly receiving support, within informal “neighborhood watch” groups, directly from American troops.

During Mr. Bush’s visit to the Pentagon on Friday, he also heard a presentation by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, that appeared to preview much of what he will tell Congress when he gives his Iraq progress report scheduled in nine days.

But that discussion quickly focused on an issue Mr. Bush and his aides are accused of mishandling after the invasion: making sure that Sunnis are empowered and that they receive a share of the funds that flow from Baghdad, where Shiite leaders have seen their moment for revenge against their former oppressors under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Mr. Bush and his commanders weighed whether to reward the Sunnis with early provincial elections, restoring a degree of political power to them. But calling elections is no longer within the power of the United States, and the Shiite-dominated national government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has long opposed empowering the Sunnis.

They also discussed ways to pressure Mr. Maliki’s government to provide millions of dollars in Iraqi funds — much of it oil money — to reconstruction of Anbar’s schools and health care centers and the reopening of state-run factories.

“This is all about finding ways to circumvent Maliki,” said one senior official who is involved in preparing Mr. Bush’s presentation of a new strategy, which will probably come in an address to the country after General Petraeus and the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, have presented their report to Congress starting on Sept. 10. “We can’t go to the Hill again and say Maliki will perform if we just give him the space. He won’t. So you find other means to accomplish the goal.”

But circumventing a central government that the United States itself set up is unlikely to prove easy. In the end, it is the new Iraqi government that has control of the country’s treasury, and determining when to hold elections around the country is a subject the Iraqi Parliament has not been able to agree upon.

“There is an effort to accelerate the bottom-up reconciliation,” said one Defense Department official who declined to speak on the record. “The idea is to capitalize on the unexpected progress made at the provincial level through the Sunni awakening and efforts to work with former insurgents. We are increasing Iraqi and American money being invested in the provinces.”

The money would come, the official said, by spending State Department funds through provincial reconstruction teams, which are finally being deployed in significant numbers. Some would come from American military commanders, who have emergency funds at their disposal, and some from a Department of Defense program to generate jobs by revitalizing state-owned industries — a reversal of the privatization effort begun by American forces four years ago.

The reduction in attacks on Americans in Anbar, according to current and recently departed officials, has fueled a new optimism in the White House that Republican defections from Mr. Bush’s overall Iraq policy will be limited, and that Democrats will once again find themselves unable to assemble the votes to cut off financing or force an early withdrawal of troops.

But Mr. Bush’s argument that Anbar is a locus of progress has drawn fire from Democrats and critics of his war strategy, who say that he is picking out a single tactical accomplishment and ignoring broader strategic failures that have been documented by the intelligence community, the Government Accountability Office and an independent commission examining the Iraqi military and police.

The president is expected to argue that what has happened in Anbar is beginning to be replicated in Diyala Province and other places, and that to pull back now — and fail to reward the Sunnis in Anbar — would halt the first significant gains that American forces had made against the insurgency in four years.

Officials were cautious about discussing Friday’s Pentagon meeting. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were said to have used it to hear a variety of viewpoints, officials said, including lengthy descriptions from the Joint Chiefs about how the increase in forces is unsustainable beyond spring without extending the tours of forces already in Iraq. Several aides to Mr. Bush have said in recent weeks that such extensions are so politically unpalatable that they are not under consideration unless an emergency breaks out requiring the use of American forces elsewhere in the world.

But Mr. Bush, they said, is also unlikely to wait until April to begin the drawdown. If he does so, he would have to pull troops out at the same pace at which he sent them this year, about a brigade a month, the officials said.

By beginning a drawdown slightly earlier, the officials say, Mr. Bush would both maximize his flexibility and avoid having to stick to a strict timeline for withdrawal, which the president has said in the past would signal to enemy forces exactly when and how quickly American forces would begin to leave.