Bush pleads for more patience for Iraq war efforts

By Jeremy Pelofsky

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush, faced with growing calls to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, pleaded with Americans on Saturday for patience and cited progress in the past two months.

"The success of the past couple of months have shown that conditions on the ground can change -- and they are changing," he said in his weekly radio address. "We cannot expect the new strategy we are carrying out to bring success overnight."

Bush is facing mounting pressure from Democrats and a senior Republican lawmaker to begin pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq to show the government there that the American commitment is not open-ended.

Earlier this week, Bush drew parallels to the Vietnam War, raising the example of the emergence of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and violence in Vietnam after U.S. troops pulled out to warn of the consequences of leaving Iraq.

But, he acknowledged that despite increasing the number of troops in Iraq to tamp down the unrelenting violence, there was growing frustration that the government had not made much progress on political goals.

Still, Bush argued that young men were signing up for the Iraqi military, police were patrolling the streets and more operations with both U.S.-led troops and Iraqi forces were being conducted.

On Thursday, he suffered a setback when Sen. John Warner of Virginia, an influential congressional voice on military affairs in Bush's Republican Party, urged for an initial pullout of 5,000 troops who would be home by December.

Warner declined to back setting a withdrawal timetable but Democrats are expected next month to ratchet up pressure to do just that.