Bush Bluntly Defends Iraq Strategy, but Admits Problems

President Bush gave a blunt defense of the American strategy in Iraq today, while acknowledging that ordinary Iraqis had been left exposed to the horrors of terrorism during the war's earlier stages.

As the debate continued over where the war is headed at its third anniversary, a leading Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., called on Mr. Bush to throw himself into an all-out effort to forge a government of national unity in Iraq and to begin planning for a civil war that was likely to follow if the effort failed.

Mr. Bush delivered an account from the Iraq war today that was both uncharacteristically grim and characteristically optimistic. Speaking to the City Club in Cleveland, the president told how Tal Afar, a city in western Iraq, had been freed from the control of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had taken over after a too-brief military operation by American forces in 2004.