At least 25 of the US troops killed this month died in the vast stretch of desert that extends from the capital to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The large number of casualties reflects the strength of Sunni insurgents, including al-Qa'ida in Iraq, in the region, even as violence in Baghdad shifts to a fight between Sunni and Shia extremists.

It also comes despite a decision by some US commanders in the area to pull troops out of combat missions and partner them with Iraqi army units as advisers and mentors.

At least 2,942 members of the US military have died since the invasion in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

"They took all the men, separated them from the women and left," a witness told Reuters.

Baghdad is plagued by daily kidnappings, both political and criminal. Last week, gunmen in camouflage fatigues abducted some 30 people in an industrial area in central Baghdad but released most of them a few hours later.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government is struggling to contain soaring sectarian tension and daily violence that U.N. officials estimate kills more than 100 people a day.

IRAQ RETHINK

Blair, Washington's closest ally, arrived in Baghdad on Sunday to lend support to the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from Washington to do more to stem violence between Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.

Violence in Iraq since the 2003 invasion has marred Blair's final years in office, dividing the British public and his party, depleting his popularity ratings and reducing Britain's credibility in the region, analysts say.

Washington and London are reassessing their plans for Iraq.

The Iraq stopover forms part of a Middle East tour aimed at helping to break a deadlock between Palestinian factions and nudge forward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Blair sees progress in that conflict as key to defusing regional tensions and helping to stem the Iraqi insurgency.

In turn, progress in Iraq is vital to Blair's legacy that looks set to be overshadowed by the war. He will step down next year after a decade as prime minister.

Blair met with Maliki and was due to hold meeting with other Iraqi officials. (Baghdad newsroom))

President George W. Bush is considering several options for a new strategy in Iraq. The most likely choice would be to send tens of thousands of additional troops for an indefinite period to quickly secure Baghdad.

A 3,500-man brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division will be sent to Kuwait soon after the holidays, CBS News correspondent David Martin reported on Friday. The troops would be available immediately should the president order a surge into Iraq.

There are about 134,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now.

Powell, also a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not see the military benefit of flooding Baghdad with American troops.

"I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work," he said, adding that the Iraqi government and security forces must take over.

"It is the D.C. police force that guards Washington, D.C., not the troops that are stationed at Fort Myer," Powell said. "And in Baghdad, you need a police force to do that, and in the other cities, you need a police force to do that, and not the American troops."

Powell also doubted that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are large enough to support such an operation.

"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," Powell said. "We need to let both the Army and the Marine Corps grow in size, in my military judgment."

Asked directly what the U.S. should do in Iraq, Powell said:

"I think that what we should do is to work with the Iraqi government, press them on the political peace, do everything we can to provide equipment, advisers, and whatever the Iraqi armed forces need to become more competent, and to train their leaders so that those leaders realize their responsibility to the government."

Powell, who as a member of the Bush Administration pushed the international community to sanction the invasion of Iraq, said that we are not safer now after nearly four years of fighting.

"I think we are a little less safe, in the sense that we don't have the same force structure available for other problems," Powell said. "I think we have been somewhat constrained in our ability to influence events elsewhere."

©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Bob Varney, the executive director of Christian Embassy, the group that made the video, tells Salon he believes no regulations were violated, and he says Weinstein's allegations about increased evangelical influence within the military are wrong.

"I don't understand how one could come to that kind of conclusion," Varney says. "The military believes in religious freedom, it offers religious freedom, it therefore offers people of different religions to express them, and we're one among a number of different religions that are working in the Armed Services."

Weinstein spoke with Salon Tuesday afternoon.

The Christian Embassy is now saying it had permission to film this inside the Pentagon. Were you surprised to hear that?

Not at all. They're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't. If they said they didn't have permission, they would have been blown away. Having permission, to me, just shows the complicity. We have a systemic problem. You sound like you're too young to remember Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," but the premise of that movie was that there was a CIA within the CIA. We have a virulently dominionist, fundamentalist evangelical Christian element within the Pentagon. They would prefer this to be the "Pentecostalgon," not the Pentagon. That's what they would prefer. They're trying to turn the Pentagon into a frickin' faith-based initiative, and that is not what our military is about.

These are the people who, when I talk to senior members of the military at the flag-level rank -- I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, that means admiral or general -- that have looked at me and said, "Come on, Mikey, what's your problem? We have the cure to cancer. If you had the cure to cancer, wouldn't you want to spread the word?" They don't realize when they say it, they don't have the mental wherewithal to understand that to a person who isn't an evangelical Christian, you're calling our faith a cancer.

What's wrong with this video?

I'm trying to think where to start. It is absolutely violative of a mountain of Department of Defense internal regulations, guidelines, core values, instructions, making it very clear that members of the military can not endorse any one particular political position, partisan religious view, they can't hold up a tube of toothpaste like Colgate and push it. Irrespective of that, it's also blatantly violative of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and at least as important it's violative of Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution -- you don't even have to get into the Bill of Rights -- which states that we will never have a religion test for any position in the federal government, which was brilliantly prescient of our Founding Fathers.

This, to me, constitutes as much of a national security threat to this country as al-Qaida. In fact, the video itself, to me, would be the No. 1 recruiting tool that I would expect bin Laden, the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, although he's dead, Ayman al Zawahiri, Hezbollah with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, to get angry young Islamic men and women in Iran, Syria and Lebanon to join the insurrection and jihadi terrorist activities. This would be a perfect accelerant to create even further conflagration.

Now, I was a JAG [judge advocate general, the lawyers who act as prosecutors and defense attorneys within the military] in the Air Force. I spent three and a half years as a lawyer for President Ronald Reagan in the West Wing, I've been Ross Perot's general counsel. I know the religious right would love to vilify me as a tree-hugging Northern California Sierra Club membership chardonnay-sipping liberal -- not that there'd be anything wrong with that, to wax Seinfeldian -- but I'm not. I'm a Republican. And my family has a very, very long and distinguished military history. We have three consecutive generations of military academy graduates, and my youngest son, who's at the Air Force Academy now, he's a senior, what's called a first classman, is the sixth member of my family to attend the academy. We have 115 years of combined active-duty military service to this country in my immediate family from every combat engagement from World War I to the current one, and this is a pernicious torturing of what our military is supposed to be about.

Of course, I realize people have religious rights. We only have about 2,200 chaplains in each of the military branches; every base has multiple chapels, and these people can pray all they want to themselves, like kids in school can pray to themselves, but when you're in the military, and you're coming in like that one person, Catton, whom I knew when I was a kid at the [Air Force] Academy, and he goes, "I share my faith, that's who I am, and let me tell you right now, the hierarchy as an old-fashioned American is that your first duty is to the Lord, second to your family and your third is to your country." That is the exact opposite of what is taught, and for anyone who understands anything about the military, it is always the country first. When you're told, "Troopers, we're going to go take that hill," you can't stop, fall to your knees and see what your particular version of Moses, Vishnu, Satan, Jesus, Mohammed, Allah, whatever they're going to say, and then quickly make a cellphone call to your family. So it is beyond-the-pale egregious, it is a national security threat every bit as bad as al-Qaida, and these people should be court-martialed. Forty percent of active-duty military personnel consider themselves evangelical Christians. Is your position popular in the military? We have 702 U.S. military installations scattered in 132 countries around the world, and I get calls 24/7 from the soldiers, Marines and airmen. Unlike cops, they don't have a union, they have my foundation, that's it. They're being tormented. And 96 percent of those who come flooding in, on fire with torment, are Christians, three-fourths of whom would be traditional Protestants: Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians. The other one-fourth are Roman Catholics. These are Christians being preyed upon by evangelical Christians -- pray and prey -- and being told that you're not Christian enough, therefore you're going to burn in a hell of fire. Many [evangelical Christians] tell me, "Mikey, OK, Anne Frank, Dr. Seuss, Jack Benny, Gandhi, they're all burning eternally in the fires of hell." And here's the distinction they just don't fucking get, these cocksuckers do not get this: I would give my last drop of blood and my last breath, and I would commend my three children in the Air Force -- one of whom's going to be heading to Iraq in a few months -- to give their last drop of blood and their last breath to support the rights of these people to believe that Anne Frank is burning eternally in hell ... If they want to believe that their version of Jesus has her burning eternally in hell, I'd give my life for that. But I will not do that if my government tells me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God or no God at all. And that's what these monsters are doing. Is there pressure on the non-evangelicals in the military to convert or keep quiet because some of their superiors have these views and are talking about these views? Oh, absolutely. Like I said, in the military, many of your constitutional rights are gone, because it's necessary. Look, let's make sure your readers understand something, OK, put it in perspective: The U.S. military, which I consider a noble and honorable institution, is technologically the most lethal organization ever created by Homo sapiens. When you have the leadership believing that to be a good soldier, good Marine, good airman or sailor you have to be not just a Christian but the right type of Christian, we're no better than al-Qaida. And it's hideous, beyond belief. My kids were called "fucking Jews" and accused of total complicity, they and their people, in the execution of Jesus Christ, by superiors up and down the chain of command at the Air Force Academy. But like I've said before, most of the people who've come to me are Christians. That's been the big sea change here. Look, Sinclair Lewis said it best, in [the 1930s]. He came back from Germany, he was observing it for a number of months ... and he [said] that he had now seen fascism up close and personal, and he knew that when it came to America it would be wrapped in the American flag, carrying a cross. And you know what? He's right. It's one thing to be pushing evangelical Christianity on prisoners in a penitentiary and to be pushing intelligent design in public schools. That's bad enough, but that's not our fight. My foundation focuses, with laserlike precision, on the Marine Corps, Army, Navy and Air Force, because if we lose them, we lose everything. Your youngest son is at the Air Force Academy, which has been the focus of a lot of the allegations about evangelical proselytizing. With you being so out-front on this, has he been the target of any reprisals? No. I think that they realize if they touch a hair on his head, I will open up the skies and bring down a hammer and tongs like they've never seen before. There have been some snide remarks, but in the main it's steady cruising. Now, my older son and his wife have had a few things. They're both first lieutenants. In the military, you wear a name tag, and their name is Weinstein. My daughter-in-law has had senior officers walk up to her and say, "I know who you are, and I know what you're family is all about." She's a junior officer, so she just looks at them. In the main, it's been fairly calm, because they're not that stupid to think that my kids wouldn't make a phone call, and then I'm going to do what I have to do. But I can tell you that I get -- I don't think I'm in double digits, but it started at about 10 o'clock last night; after the press conference in the morning, I've had nine death threats since about 10 o'clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They're very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We've had our tires slashed, we've had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we've had dead animals placed on the front door of the house. I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "Fuck you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff. So if this is a nice, Christian response, my response is take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line, because we're not going to stop, we're not going to ever stop, we're going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds on these people that are trying to destroy our Constitution. This is not a Christian-Jewish issue, and it's also not a political spectrum, left or right issue, it's a Constitutional right and wrong issue. These officers, and what's happening in that video, simply by appearing in a video that is blatantly and vociferously sectarian, by simply doing three things in that video, they should be court-martialed. That would be circulating blood, reflecting light and breathing. That's all they had to do and that alone would have been enough. You're not Jewish, are you? I am, actually. You understand the word "dayenu"? Well, it's dayenu -- the dayenu factor is simply by letting the light reflect off you, circulating blood and breathing in that video. Everything else beyond that is extra. Dayenu's my favorite song at Passover, that's why I use it. My response is I've given the new secretary of defense 20 days to answer the Freedom of Information Act request, which the law gives him, and at the end we intend to get as much information as we can, fashion it into a dagger and then stab at the heart of this unconstitutional, wretched, vile, darkness at the Pentagon. This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it.

After appearing only seven weeks ago on the Internet, the Appeal for Redress, brainchild of 29-year-old Navy seaman Jonathan Hutto, has already been signed by nearly 1,000 US soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, including dozens of officers--most of whom are on active duty. Not since 1969, when some 1,300 active-duty military personnel signed an open letter in the New York Times opposing the war in Vietnam, has there been such a dramatic barometer of rising military dissent.

Interviews with two dozen signers of the Appeal reveal a mix of motives for opposing the war: ideological, practical, strategic and moral. But all those interviewed agree that it is time to start withdrawing the troops. Coming from an all-volunteer military, the Appeal was called "unprecedented" by Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.

Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive.

At present, only about 17,000 American soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible.

The details of the plan under study by the White House are not known, but in most scenarios the troop increase would be accomplished in large part by accelerating some scheduled deployments while delaying the departure of units in Iraq.

President Bush has made no final decision, the White House said. Gordon Johndroe, the National Security Council spokesman, said that no memorandums outlining the options for increasing troop strength had gone to the president. But one senior official said the subject was discussed at length on Wednesday during Mr. Bush's briefing at the Pentagon, and the president has reportedly asked detailed questions that some officials have interpreted as suggesting that he is strongly leaning in that direction.

American military officials said Friday night that the Pentagon was planning to send the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Kuwait in January. The brigade, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., would serve as a reserve that commanders in Iraq could draw on.

American military commanders have been operating without such a reserve since the Marine unit that had been on call was dispatched to Anbar Province in western Iraq. The Army brigade could become an element of a larger troop deployment to Iraq if the White House decided to increase troops there.

That option has been central to a broader debate in Washington. Advocates of a troop increase say the aim would be to reverse the slide toward an all-out civil war and give the new Iraqi government more time to consolidate control, while training of Iraqis is stepped up.

At the same time, American and Iraqi forces would try to tamp down strife in neighborhoods that contain Shiites and Sunnis, and slow insurgent attacks. To be effective, proponents say, these tactics would need to be married to a broader political and economic strategy to generate employment in Baghdad and stabilize Iraq.

Critics of a surge approach have argued that any American troop increase would lead to more American casualties and merely put off the day when the Iraqis need to assume responsibility for their own security.

There is also concern that the military benefits would be short-lived unless the higher troop levels were sustained for a long period, adding to the strain on American forces. Alternatively, critics say, if the surge in troop levels was too brief, adversaries could simply wait for the reinforcements to leave.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said during a visit to Baghdad this week that American military commanders were discussing the possibility of adding as many as 10 more combat brigades - a maximum of about 35,000 troops - to establish some of control while Iraq's divided political leaders seek solutions to the mounting violence.

On Friday, however, one administration official said that additional work was needed to fit a troop increase into the larger strategy, as well as on technical aspects about how the operation would be carried out. "There has not been a full articulation of what we would want the surge to accomplish," he said.

Strikingly, the surge proposal has not been actively promoted by the top commander in Iraq. General Casey, the senior American commander in Baghdad, has emphasized faster training of Iraqi security forces, an effort that would be supported in part by converting existing combat forces into trainers.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, has said that the advantages of a surge in troop levels would be temporary, and that it might dissuade Iraqis from doing more to provide for their own security.

Some of the chiefs of the services that would supply forces for the surge have spoken about it in hedged terms. "We would not surge without a purpose," Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told reporters on Thursday. "And that purpose should be measurable."

But Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who is assuming day-to-day command of American troops in Iraq from Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, is said to be sympathetic to the idea.

The surge proposal has also gained greater support among recently retired officers who served in Iraq, particularly if carried out as part of a broader political and economic strategy.

Two retired Army veterans who served in the unit that took control of the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 - Col. Joel Armstrong and Maj. Daniel Dwyer - helped draft a new study issued Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute that called for sending an additional four or five combat brigades, or some 14,000 to 17,500 troops, to Baghdad.

The study determined that the military could sustain a surge of that level, but that it would require sending several Army brigades back to Iraq a couple of months early and extending the customary yearlong Army tour to 15 months.

In its report last week, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group rejected the idea of a "substantial" force increase on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 troops, saying that those levels were not "available for a sustained deployment" and would feed fears in Iraq that the United States was planning a long-term occupation.

"We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad," the report added, "or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective."

Bush Speaks With Maliki

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - President Bush held a videoconference with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, on Friday, the eve of a Baghdad conference aimed at cooling sectarian violence.

At the conference, Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni Arab politicians are expected to discuss a reconciliation plan that includes possible amnesty for insurgent fighters and proposals to curb militia violence.

White House officials said Mr. Bush spoke by secure video with Mr. Maliki for roughly half an hour.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Maliki talked about his desire "for a larger core of Iraqi political leaders to come together for the common objective of stabilizing Iraq." The Bush administration has been encouraging Mr. Maliki to rely less on the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

The warning by General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's Chief of Staff, came as Donald Rumsfeld spent his final day at the Pentagon yesterday. They have been taken as a plea to Robert Gates, the incoming Defence Secretary who will be sworn in on Monday, to strengthen the armed forces.

It is widely expected that the new Pentagon chief will replace key senior advisers, including Marine General Peter Pace, the joint chiefs chairman, and possibly General John Abizaid, who is in charge of US Central Command which oversees the Iraq war.

In his testimony to a congressional panel, General Schoomaker called for the forces to be expanded by 7,000 a year for the foreseeable future. At current levels, the Army was "incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror", he said

Gen Schoomaker said the army had been "flat-footed" when it embarked on the Iraq war in 2003 with a force barely a third the size of the 500,000-strong army that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.

In a separate development, nearly 1,000 members of the US military, have signed a petition calling for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Their number is said to include dozens of officers, most of them on active service.

Mr Ross told Lord Butler he read UK and US human and signals intelligence on Iraq every working day during the four years he spent in New York up to 2002, and spoke at length to UN weapons inspectors.

"At no time did [the government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK," he told the Butler committee. "On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained ... At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

Mr Ross continued: "There was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material. Aerial or satellite surveillance was unable to get under the roofs of Iraqi facilities. We therefore had to rely on inherently unreliable human sources."

He added: "Iraq's ability to launch a WMD or any form of attack was very limited. There were approximately 12 or so unaccounted-for Scud missiles; Iraq's airforce was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier might; there was no evidence of any connection with any terrorist organisation that might have planned an attack using Iraqi WMD."

Mr Ross said he repeatedly questioned FO and Ministry of Defence officials about their threat assessments of Iraq. He said: "None told me that any new evidence had emerged to change our assessment; what had changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light." Referring to the government's weapons adviser who later committed suicide, he added: "I discussed this at some length with David Kelly in late 2002, who agreed that the Number 10 WMD dossier was overstated".

He said colleagues in other UN delegations told him the UK sold security council resolution 1441 - later used to help justify the invasion - "explicitly on the grounds that it did not represent authorisation for war".

Mr Ross, who was responsible at the UK's UN mission for sanctions as well as weapons inspections, said he and his FO colleagues repeatedly attempted to get the UK and US to act more vigorously on the breaches.

Mr Ross resigned from the FO in 2004.

Sir John Major, the former prime minister, backed calls for an independent inquiry into the causes and conduct of the war. It should include "new information that is becoming available", he told Radio 4's Today.