WASHINGTON, Dec 20: President George W. Bush conceded for the first time on Wednesday that the United States was not winning the war in Iraq and called for an increase in the size of the US military, particularly the Army and Marines.

At his traditional year-end news conference in the White House, Mr Bush explained a striking shift in his position -– from an earlier insistence that the US was `absolutely winning’ to an admission that it was neither winning nor losing in Iraq.

He said his earlier comments were meant to say that, "I believe that we're going to win, I believe that ... My comments yesterday reflected the fact that we're not succeeding nearly as fast as I had wanted."

In an interview to the Washington Post on Tuesday, Mr Bush had acknowledged that, “we’re not winning; we’re not losing in Iraq.”

This contradicts the claim he made at an Oct 25 news conference in the White House where he said: “Absolutely, we're winning ... We're winning, and we will win, unless we leave before the job is done.”

At Wednesday’s news conference, he noted that the Iraqi insurgents had succeeded in fomenting sectarian violence in Iraq. “Their success hurt our efforts to help the Iraqis rebuild their country. They set back reconciliation and kept Iraq's unity government and our coalition from establishing security and stability throughout the country.”

Mr Bush said that he had asked his new Secretary of Defence Robert Gates to draw up plans to increase the overall size of the Army and the Marines.

"We're going to be in a long struggle against radicals and extremists," he said while explaining why he had also changed his earlier position on not expanding the US military. "We have an obligation to ensure our military has the capacity to sustain this war over the long haul.”