WASHINGTON, July 6: A key ally of US President George W. Bush has abandoned his policy on Iraq, urging him to devise a new strategy to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Arab country.

Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico said he wants the administration to end combat operations and bring US troops back home by spring.

“We need a new strategy for Iraq that forces the Iraqi government to do more, or else,” Senator Domenici told reporters.

The longtime senator is the latest of several top Republicans to abandon President Bush on Iraq. Other lawmakers who publicly distanced themselves from the official Iraq policy include Senators Richard Lugar, George Voinovich and John Warner. Mr Warner, a Virginia Republican, is expected to propose a new Iraq approach this month. But a top US military commander warned on Friday that an early withdrawal of troops from Iraq would leave the country “a mess.”

Major General Rick Lynch, commander of coalition forces in central Iraq, linked progress in the fight against insurgents to the deployment of additional troops to Iraq over the past four months.

“Those surge forces have given us the capability that we have now to take the fight to the enemy,” he told reporters in Washington via satellite from Camp Victory in Baghdad. “If those surge forces go away, that capability goes away and the Iraqi security forces aren’t ready yet to do that,” Gen Lynch said. “It would be a mess.”

Senator Domenici, however, disagreed with this assessment saying that he believes the government cannot continue asking its troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress to move its country forward.

The lawmaker, who is a senior member of the Senate panel that oversees defence spending, said in a news conference that he now supports a bipartisan bill that embraces the findings of the independent Iraq Study Group.

The report says the US should reduce political, military or economic support for Iraq if they cannot make substantial progress.

Last week, Senator Lugar, a senior Republican, sent shock waves through Washington by taking to the floor of the Senate to argue that President Bush’s ‘troop surge’ was unlikely to work.