President George W. Bush laid public his new Iraq policy on January 10 (American eastern times) after more than three months of deliberation. Its main points are, among others, to dispatch additional 20,000-plus servicemen to Iraq, readjust his military strategy, demand the Iraqi government to take more responsibilities, and mete out telling blows to hostilities of Iran and Syria in Iraq and to win the support of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other moderate countries in the Middle East.

Beyond any doubt, the release of the new Iraq policy means a further escalation of actions in Iraq. It has been generally acknowledged inside the U.S. that an increase in troops is of the same nature with its incessant expansion of military input of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For this reason, Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy said the Iraq war had been evolved into Bush's "Vietnam War". Moreover, the U.S.' tactical adjustment has also "gives the green light" to military escalation, as more soldiers are needed not only to carry out more flexible special warfare but to defend the occupied areas.

The new policy, however, cannot extricate the U.S. of its impasse in the war. It is, in essence, still "old wine in the new bottle", as a popular Chinese proverb put it. The New York Times acknowledged that some of its assertions in the spheres of economics and politics had been tried out but failed. "The disaster was Bush's war and he had already failed," the paper said. As a matter of fact, a couple of measures involved in the new policy for economic reconstruction and political reconciliation are more or less identical with the US strategy to win victory in Iraq proposed in Nov. 2006, which failed to stem the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

The root cause of the Iraq issue hinges on the domestic situation in Iraq as its current government can hardly cooperate with the Bush government well and effectively, and its in-depth reason is ascribed to disparities among different sectarian factions, races and tribes inside Iraq on the recognition of varied identities. To date, not a single political force in Iraq is able to unite the entire Iraqi people, but Bush, overlooking this point, has been bent on "tying" or "bonding" the three sectarian factions of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

It is rather difficult to alter the existing situation greatly with an increase in troops, nevertheless. According to the "Washington Post", Pentagon insiders say members of the US Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have long opposed an increase in troops and are only grudgingly going along with the plan because they have been promised that military escalation will be matched by renewed political and economic efforts in Iraq. In fact, it is really hard to imagine that a tough task, which has failed to be fulfilled by 130,000 American servicemen in four years, can now be accomplished with the increase of merely some 200,000 soldiers.

With an unlikely domestic backing from the U.S., the new policy would possibly give rise to acute, intensified conflicts between the White House and Congress. The main contents of the new policy are poles apart with that of a report of the "Iraq Study Group,"released in late 2006 and reflected the consesus of both Republicans and Democrats. Particularly at a time when the American populace favored a troop pullout from Iraq, this decision of Bush's for an increase in troops is all the more unacceptable, and some Congressmen of both parties are in firm opposition to this new policy.

"While we all want to see a stable and peaceful Iraq, many current and former senior military leaders have made clear that sending more American combat troops does not advance the goal," warned Housed Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders in a statement. Prior to Bush's policy address, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid sent a joint letter to the US president with an indication that the US military strength will be plunged into more straitened circumstances as more American soldiers will die with an increase in the combat strength.

Here, what merits special attention is that the Democrats have undertaken to restrict the Bush administration in advancing its new Iraq policy, and Senator Edward Kennedy required Bush to get an approval from Congress before he would send additional troops to Iraq. And several hearings on the Iraq issue were held on Friday by military, diplomatic and other relevant committees of both chambers of Congress.

In view of Bush's enhanced resolution to press ahead with his new policy, the Democratic Party, taking the advantage of an anti-war sentiments surge in the U.S. and its leading position in Congress, is apparently anxious to put an end to the situation with a lack of check and balance on the part of Republicans since the beginning of the Bush presidency. It can be anticipated that the White House and Congress will be locked in fierce "games" or rivalries on the Iraq war in a period to come and they will be eventually at a total loss as what to do with the new Iraq policy.

By the People's Daily Online, and the author Zhang Jiye, a noted scholar of American Studies with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations