U.S. President George W. Bush holds a news conference in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Buildings in Washington yesterday. - Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters):

The United States will not be 'run out' of the Middle East by the Iraq crisis, President George W. Bush said yesterday, and he predicted a long struggle against terrorism requiring a bigger U.S. military.

Bush also told an end-of-the-year news conference he was weighing a short-term increase in U.S. troops in Iraq to help quell the sectarian violence raging in Baghdad.

"I haven't made up my mind yet about more troops (for Iraq)," Bush said. "We're looking at all options, and one of those options, of course, is increasing more troops, but in order to do so there must be a specific mission that can be accomplished with more troops."

Bush is expected to announce a new Iraq strategy in January, after elections last month in which his Republican party lost control of the U.S. Congress largely because of public discontent over the almost four-year-long war.

Supporters of sending more troops to Iraq said the Pentagon's own bleak assessment this week of a 22 per cent rise in violence over the past three months meant that a short-term influx of U.S. forces was needed.

But critics say the rising violence showed instead that U.S. efforts to secure Baghdad were not working.

Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. military commander of forces in the Middle East who announced on Wednesday he is retiring early next year, said last month that "troop levels need to stay where they are," rejecting calls for increases or withdrawals.

Bush, who acknowledged in a Washington Post interview published on Wednesday that the United States was not winning in Iraq, predicted eventual victory and said the United States would not abandon Iraq nor would it be intimidated into leaving the region.

"They can't run us out of the Middle East," Bush said. "They can't intimidate America."

The president said he was "inclined to believe" that there needed to be a permanent boost in the overall U.S. military because of the what he saw as a "long struggle against radicals and extremists."