US: Faced with a slump in popular support for the war in Iraq, US president George Bush will deliver a major address to the nation on Tuesday evening which the White House has asked US television networks to broadcast live.
Mr Bush gave a preview yesterday of what he will tell the American people, when speaking to reporters after meeting Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in the White House.
"The enemy's goal is to drive us out of Iraq before the Iraqis have established a secure democratic government," he said. "They will not succeed."
Mr Bush's first meeting with the Iraqi prime minister came against a background of intensified violence in Iraq since elections earlier in the year.
The latest American casualties include five marines - three of them women - and a sailor killed in a suicide bomb blast in Fallujah, and at least 13 other injured.
More than 1,700 American troops have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion and there have been 479 car bombs in the country since the handover of sovereignty on June 28th, 2004, according to the Associated Press.
In recent polls a majority of Americans have said they think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and want a timetable for the start of a troop withdrawal.
"This is a critical moment, this is a time of testing," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday when announcing that Mr Bush would make his prime-time speech at the US military base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Mr Bush, with the Iraqi prime minister standing beside him, told reporters "there are not going to be any timetables" for withdrawal of American forces until Iraqis could defend themselves. "There's no question there's an enemy that still wants to shake our will and get us to leave," he said.
"They try to kill and they do kill innocent Iraqi people, women and children, because they know that the carnage that they reap will be on TV and they know that it bothers people to see death. And it does. It bothers me. It bothers American citizens. It bothers Iraqis."
There was, however, reason to be optimistic, he said, as US commanders at a briefing yesterday in the White House had told him they were "making good progress" again a "violent and ruthless" insurgency.
Political progress that was being made would lead to victory and US troops would eventually withdraw "with honour".
Mr Jaafari called on Mr Bush to help to rebuild Iraq just as the US helped revive Germany with the Marshall Plan after the second World War.
"You have given us more than money," he said. "You have given us your sons, your children, that were killed beside our own children in Iraq ... This is more precious than any other support we have received."
On Thursday Mr Jaafari said in Washington that setting a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces would be a sign of weakness and would open the country to increased terrorist activity.
Coinciding with Mr Jaafari's visit, the senior American commander in the Persian Gulf, Gen John Abizaid, testified to Congress that the Iraqi insurgency has not grown weaker over the past six months, undercutting vice president Dick Cheney's recent assertion that the insurgency was in its "last throes".
"I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," Gen Abizaid said. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency."
Mr Cheney, meanwhile, told CNN the US would not close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. "They're very well treated down there. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want," he said. "There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."
Amnesty International recently compared Guantanamo to the Soviet-era gulag.