The call came days before Bush is scheduled to announce his new strategy for victory in the violence-torn country. The plan will reportedly call for bolstering the US military presence in Baghdad by up to 20,000 troops and pouring into Iraq millions of dollars of new aid to create jobs.

The president was expected to unveil the plan -- which Sunday’s New York Times said would be called "A New Way Forward" -- this week, possibly in a nationally-televised speech on Wednesday.

But in a weekly Democratic radio address on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made clear the congressional majority saw the solution in getting the troops out after nearly four years of war rather than sending more of them in.

"In pursuit of results, the new Congress will face many challenges this year, but none more important than working with President Bush to find an end to the intractable war in Iraq," Reid said.

In contrast to Bush, the Senate leader said Iraq was in the middle of a "civil war" and argued against any attempt to resolve the problem by pumping up US troop levels.

"These military professionals tell us there is no purely military solution in Iraq, there is only a political solution in Iraq. They say adding more US combat troops in the middle of this civil war undermines our efforts to get the Iraqis to take responsibility ...

He said US soldiers and their families had already sacrificed a great deal for Iraq.

"Rather than deploying additional forces to Iraq, we hope the president will make clear to the Iraqi government that the time has come for them to assume more responsibility for their future, and that he will announce he is beginning the phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months," Reid said.

The Senate leader stopped short of saying Democrats will used their newly-gained power in Congress to block funding for new troop deployments should the administration opt for a "surge."

But he promised Democrats will use upcoming Capitol Hill hearings "to ask tough questions, demand real solutions, and keep working to bring this war to a close."

Earlier Saturday, President Bush pointedly sidestepped the issue of Iraq as he spoke, in a similar radio address, about the need for bipartisan cooperation between his Republican administration and the new congressional majority.

Instead, he offered Democrats partnership in efforts to eliminate the budget deficit and improving education.

On Sunday, former top NATO commander and US Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark added his voice to the chorus of critics of the proposed "surge."

"In Kosovo, we had 40,000 troops for a population of two million," wrote Clark, who commanded allied forces during the 1999 Kosovo war.

"For Iraq, that ratio would call for at least 500,000 troops, so adding 20,000 now is too little, too late," he added in an article published in Britain’s Independent newspaper.

The Washington Post also warned in an editorial Sunday that "if he chooses escalation, Mr. Bush will have to work a lot harder than he has before to explain the mission."

But remarkably, the public at large remained highly skeptical of the ability of both Bush and congressional Democrats to untangle the Iraqi conundrum.

A CBS News poll conducted in the first days of the year showed that only 20 percent of Americans believed Bush had a clear plan for dealing with Iraq, while 76 percent said that he did not.

The findings were even worse for Democrats, with 82 percent of respondents saying the new congressional majority has no idea what to do in Iraq.