Bush says no shift on Iraq

The White House report is being sent to Congress after several prominent Republicans have broken ranks with Bush on Iraq, adding momentum to Democratic-led efforts to try to force a scaling-back of troop levels more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said in a statement on Thursday that the Iraqi "government is simply not providing leadership worthy of the considerable sacrifice of our forces, and this has to change immediately."

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said the White House report confirmed the Iraq war was "headed in a dangerous direction."

"The Iraqi government has not met the key political benchmarks it has set for itself and Iraqi security forces continue to lag well behind expectations," he said.

In another day of violence, a suicide bomber killed seven guests at a policeman's wedding in northern Iraq. In Baghdad, an Iraqi photographer and driver working for Reuters were killed in what police said was U.S. military action and which witnesses described as a helicopter attack.

Drafted with leading contributions from Petraeus and Crocker, the report gave the Iraqi government a satisfactory grade on eight of 18 goals set by Congress. It showed that on eight of the benchmarks, Baghdad's performance was unsatisfactory, and mixed on two others.

"The White House has spun it cautiously," said Daniel Byman, a security analyst at Georgetown University. "They're portraying it as a glass that's half full. I would say the glass is at best a quarter or a fifth full."

Braced for criticism, Bush said: "Those who believe that the battle in Iraq is lost will likely point to the unsatisfactory performance on some of the political benchmarks. But he added: "Those of us who believe the battle in Iraq can and must be won see the satisfactory performance on several of the security benchmarks as a cause for optimism."

The interim report showed limited progress by the Iraqi government in meeting goals for political reconciliation such as passing a law to share oil revenues. It also painted a picture of Iraqi security forces still plagued by sectarianism and heavily dependent on U.S. troops to conduct operations.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray and Thomas Ferraro in Washington and Baghdad bureau)