US hints at bigger Iraq pullout

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has hinted at bigger cuts to troop numbers in Iraq than those approved by President George W Bush.

Mr Gates suggested the current level of more than 160,000 soldiers could be cut to about 100,000 by the end of 2008.

Mr Bush said on Thursday about 30,000 troops might return by next summer.

Mr Gates spoke as a White House report suggested Iraq's government has made little progress in meeting key military and political benchmarks set by the US.

Bush pledges Iraq troops reduction

WASHINGTON: President Bush says he will start pulling some U.S. troops out of Iraq this month because his decision to send reinforcements earlier this year has been a success.

The president said that 5,700 U.S. forces would be home by Christmas and that four brigades a total of at least 21,500 troops would return by July, along with an undetermined number of support forces. Now at its highest level of the war, the U.S. troop strength stands at 168,000.

"The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is: return on success,"

the president said, trying to summon the nation's resolve once again to help Iraq

"defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours."

The reductions announced by Bush represented only a slight hastening of the originally scheduled end of the troop increase that Bush announced in January. When the cutbacks are complete, about 132,000 U.S. forces will be in Iraq.

Bush said Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America.

"And we are ready to begin building that relationship in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops."

Bush described the gradual withdrawals, and the U.S. forces still fighting in Iraq, as a compromise on which war supporters and opponents could agree.

"The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together,"

Bush said.