Denouncing Democrats from coast to coast for trying to limit his freedom of action in Iraq, President Bush is betting - as he often has - that when it comes to national security, confrontation works better than conciliation.

"A strategy that encourages this enemy to wait us out is dangerous," Bush told troops Wednesday at this Army training post in the Mojave Desert, his latest salvo at the congressional effort to force a military withdrawal from Iraq.

He added, "It's dangerous for our troops, it's dangerous for our country's security, and it's not going to become the law."

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats expect that the president will win this battle in the short run; that after weeks or months of debate, Congress will eventually provide billions of dollars for the war in Iraq with only mild conditions attached.

"Ultimately, politically, we have to give him (the) money," Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, predicted in an interview on NBC early this week.

Recent polls found public support for setting a withdrawal date near the 60-percent mark, an increase over the findings in earlier surveys.

Last month, the House and Senate voted separately to approve about $103 billion in new funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but to require Bush to move toward withdrawing most U.S. combat troops from Iraq. The House bill sets a deadline of Aug. 31, 2008, for withdrawing all combat troops; the Senate bill sets a nonbinding target of March 31, 2008.

Bush has said he will veto any bill that includes a timetable for withdrawal, arguing that it will make it impossible for his military plan to succeed.

"Just as the strategy is starting to make inroads, a narrow majority in the Congress passed legislation they knew all along I would not accept," he said at Fort Irwin. The bills pushed by the Democrats "impose an artificial deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. Their bills substitute the judgment of Washington politicians for the judgment of our military commanders."

He stressed to his audience of soldiers, many in training for deployment to Iraq and assembled for lunch inside a vast gymnasium, his oft-repeated bottom-line argument for the war in Iraq - that it is necessary to protect the U.S. against terrorists.

"We're after al-Qaida," he said. The strife in Iraq "is not a civil war; it is pure evil. And I believe we have an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil."

White House counselor Dan Bartlett said the speech was part of a "drumbeat" that Bush intends to continue through next week, after which the two houses of Congress are set to try to reconcile their differing funding bills.

Bush's attempt to stymie the Democratic push for a withdrawal from Iraq has two stages, Bartlett said.

First, he hopes to make it difficult for the two houses to reach a compromise by putting pressure on centrist Democrats and Republicans, whose votes were key in the Senate, to reject any of the tougher provisions in the House bill.

Bartlett noted that the Senate bill passed by a bare majority, 51-47, with the help of two Republicans, but antiwar liberals in the House - who made up a significant part of the chamber's Democratic majority - consider the Senate bill too soft.

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