SAN DIEGO - Thousands of U.S. troops are being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt they are considered security risks, according to an Associated Press review of military records.

The number of troops held back has climbed dramatically in the past few years. And while they appear to represent a very small percentage of all U.S. military personnel, the increase is occurring at a time when the armed forces are stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are seeing an alarming trend in degrading financial health,” said Navy Capt. Mark D. Patton, commanding officer at San Diego’s Naval Base Point Loma.

The Pentagon contends financial problems can distract personnel from their duties or make them vulnerable to bribery and treason. As a result, those who fall heavily into debt can be stripped of the security clearances they need to go overseas.

While the number of revoked clearances has surged since the beginning of the Iraq war, military officials say there is no evidence that service members are deliberately running up debts to stay out of harm’s way.

Officials also say the increase has not undermined the military’s fighting ability, though some say it has complicated the job of assembling some of the units needed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

One problem, numerous causes
The problem is attributed to a lack of financial smarts among recruits; reckless spending among those exhilarated to make it home alive from a tour of duty; and the profusion of “payday lenders” — businesses that allow military personnel to borrow against their next paycheck at extremely high interest rates.

The debt problems persist despite crackdowns on payday lenders and the financial counseling the Pentagon routinely offers to the troops.

Data supplied to the AP by the Navy, Marines and Air Force show that the number of clearances revoked for financial reasons rose every year between 2002 and 2005, climbing ninefold from 284 at the start of the period to 2,654 last year. Partial numbers from this year suggest the trend continues.

More than 6,300 troops in the three branches lost their clearances during that four-year period. Roughly 900,000 people are serving in the three branches, though not all need clearances.

Army withholds financial data
The figures gathered by the AP represent just a piece of problem, because the Army — which employs an additional 500,000 people and accounts for the vast majority of the 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — rejected repeated requests over the past month to supply its data, saying such information is confidential.

At Point Loma, Patton said clearance revocations in key areas such as military police forces have gotten so common that he often looks for two sailors to fill a single posting.

Still, Patton said he had never heard of anyone racking up bills to get out of combat. “There are folks who find ways of avoiding being deployed, as there always will be, but I’ve never seen any do it through finances,” he said.

Security clearances are revoked when service members’ debt payments amount to 30 percent to 40 percent of their salary. The exact amount depends on the military branch.

There are three levels of clearance — confidential, secret and top secret. Not all troops need clearance. Marine infantrymen don’t, but some Marine specialists, such as those in intelligence, do. So do many jobs in the Navy and Air Force.

Secrets for sale?
Financial problems are the overwhelming reason security clearances are revoked. Other reasons include criminal activity, questionable allegiance and ill health.

A key reason the military revokes clearances on financial grounds is the fear that soldiers in debt might be tempted to sell secrets or equipment to the enemy.

Also, “when they are over there fighting, we like them to have their heads in the game,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of Marine Corps bases in the western United States. “We like to have them ... not worrying about whether or not they are going to be able to make the mortgage payment or car payment.”

Members of the brass also blame runaway interest rates at payday lending businesses, many of which are clustered outside bases around the country. Several states have cracked down on payday lending practices, and on Tuesday, President Bush signed legislation limiting how much these businesses can charge military personnel.

Living for the moment
Some personnel fall into debt upon returning from combat. “It can be hard to cut that sense of elation and desire to live for the moment,” Lehnert said. “Some tend to get themselves overextended financially.”

Also, when they go to war, they get combat pay, and none of their income is taxed. That can lead them to overspend when they come home.

Patton said that like other services, the Navy offers zero-interest emergency loans. Also, military personnel commonly take money-management classes as part of basic training.

“Every time we go in and do an indoctrination brief, there is instruction or training in place to give them some of the pitfalls of debt,” said Terry Harris, a personal finance educator at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. “We do inform them about the pitfalls of security clearances being lost to that.”

The increase in finance-related revocations could actually be a good sign — it could reflect greater awareness among the troops, according to Chief Master Sgt. Rodney J. McKinley, the Air Force’s highest-ranking noncommissioned officer.

“We have a few more people coming forward and saying, ‘Hey, I’m having some financial difficulty and need help,’ versus going down the other path where they keep so quiet,” McKinley said.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — A brother of Pat Tillman, the National Football League player who was killed in combat in Afghanistan after leaving his sports career to serve in the Army, has lashed out at the Iraq war in an essay published online.

The brother, Kevin Tillman, who was in the same Army Ranger unit as Pat Tillman, a corporal who was killed on April 22, 2004, by fire from his fellow soldiers under circumstances that the Pentagon continues to investigate, sharply criticized American political leadership and called the war “an illegal invasion.”

“Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes,” Mr. Tillman wrote in the 660-word essay that was posted on Thursday on Truthdig .com, a Web magazine offering news and opinion from a “progressive point of view.”

“Somehow,” Mr. Tillman added, “American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.”

In what are apparently his most expansive public remarks since the death of his brother at age 27, he also does not spare the American public, which he suggests too often relies on superficial gestures to support the troops instead of holding politicians accountable.

“Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas or slapping stickers on cars or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet,” he wrote.

Mr. Tillman ended with a suggestion that the elections on Nov. 7 are an opportunity for people opposed to the war to send a message.

“Luckily this country is still a democracy,” he wrote. “People still have a voice. People can still take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday,” Nov. 6.

Despite Pat Tillman’s fame and the outpouring of emotion after his death, the Tillman family has generally kept a distance from antiwar protesters, though they have often spoken of their efforts to find the truth about what happened. Family members did not answer messages for comment on Kevin Tillman’s posting.

A spokeswoman for the Pat Tillman Foundation in San Jose, Calif., where the Tillmans grew up, said, “It is our understanding that Kevin Tillman is not accepting interview requests.”

Pat Tillman, a safety for the Arizona Cardinals, left the team in spring 2002 to join the Army along with Kevin Tillman, motivated in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and eventually training as a Ranger. After a stint in Iraq, the brothers were sent to Afghanistan.

Pat Tillman died, the Army eventually concluded, after members of his own unit shot him as they searched for enemy fighters in a canyon in southeastern Afghanistan. An Afghan soldier fighting next to him also died.

Kevin Tillman’s essay was posted as Pentagon investigators close in on the latest of several investigations into the case. Initially, the Army had suggested that enemy fire had killed Pat Tillman. Later, the Army conceded that his comrades had shot him.

Under pressure from the family and members of Congress, the inspector general of the Defense Department and the Army Criminal Investigation Command are examining the actions of members of Mr. Tillman’s unit and the initial investigation.

Daniel Kohns, a spokesman for Representative Michael M. Honda of California, a Democrat from San Jose, who pushed for the investigations, said Pentagon representatives said a month ago that they expected to complete their work by the end of November or early December.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said Monday that the investigations were continuing. He declined to comment on Kevin Tillman’s essay.

Robert Scheer, a liberal syndicated columnist and the editor of Truthdig, based in Santa Monica, Calif., said he had written about the case and had spoken to family members in the past.

Kevin Tillman’s article was not solicited, Mr. Scheer said, and the site agreed to Mr. Tillman’s conditions for posting it. The conditions were that it be posted unchanged aside from grammatical editing, including the headline he had written, “After Pat’s Birthday.”

Mr. Scheer said Mr. Tillman had made it known that, after leaving the military last year, he felt now was time to speak out, with his brother’s birthday approaching. Pat Tillman also had expressed anger about the war to friends, several published reports have said.

“He is not proselytizing, he is not a political person,” Mr. Scheer said of Kevin Tillman. “He just decided because his birthday was coming up he felt strongly that he had to say something.”

Since the article went up on the Web site, it has received more than 4,000 responses, though Web server limits have prohibited publishing that many, Mr. Scheer said.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 19 — The American-led crackdown in Baghdad has not succeeded in reducing a “disheartening” level of violence across the capital and a new approach is needed, a military spokesman said today.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the senior spokesman for the American military in Iraq, said that the strategy of concentrating on a limited number of highly troubled neighborhoods had not slowed sectarian violence in the city as a whole.

General Caldwell said that attacks in the Baghdad area went up 22 percent during the first three weeks of Ramadan in comparison with the three weeks before.

The crackdown, which began in August, “has made a difference in the focus areas but has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence,” General Caldwell said, adding that American commanders were consulting with the Iraqi government on a change in plans.

General Caldwell’s statement comes at a politically sensitive moment, when attacks on American forces have been increasing and many Democrats are making the situation in Iraq their central issue in the fall Congressional campaign.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told reporters in Washington today that the general was not saying that the effort in Baghdad had been a failure.

“What he said is that the levels of violence had not been lowered in a way that met our expectations, and so what we’re doing is we’re adjusting to bring them down, which is what you’d expect,” Mr. Snow said.

The search for a new approach also comes at a time of increasing friction between the United States and the Iraqi government over how to deal with the Shiite militias that are responsible for much of the sectarian violence.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki flew to the holy city of Najaf on Wednesday to plead for help from Iraq’s two most influential and enigmatic Shiite clerics, a sign of the seriousness of the crisis surrounding the Iraqi government.

The deaths of two more American soldiers were reported today, bringing the toll among United States forces for the month to at least 72, putting October on track to become one of the deadliest months of the war. One of the two died Wednesday of wounds suffered in combat in western Iraq, and the other died after his vehicle struck a roadside bomb Wednesday evening north of Balad, a city that had been the scene of a burst of sectarian killing over the weekend.

Two northern cities were struck by bombs today. In Mosul, two suicide truck bombs and a string of smaller attacks killed 22 people and wounded at least 54, according to the Interior Ministry, while Agence-France Presse reported that 12 people died and 68 were wounded by a suicide car bomber who targeted a line outside a bank.

In the country’s south, fighting broke out between Iraqi police and Shiite militia members in the city of Amara, according to the news agency, which said that three militia members and four civilians were killed.

In Baghdad, General Caldwell said that violence had begun to return to some of the areas that had been the focus of the crackdown, as Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda “push back.”

He said their strategy seemed to be that “if you want to discredit this government, go back and strike at those areas” that officials have announced as newly peaceful.

He said that American forces had recently returned to the Dora neighborhood in southeastern Baghdad, which had been held up as one of the prime successes of the crackdown.

“Obviously the conditions under which we started are not the same today,” General Caldwell said.

In earlier statements, General Caldwell and other American commanders had called for patience, saying that the crackdown would take time to produce results.

General Caldwell did not explain what conditions had changed or say what new approaches were under consideration.

American officials have spoken in recent weeks about the splintering of Shiite militia groups and the growth of renegade bands linked to the Mahdi Army, the militia linked to Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric. The general cited a previous American estimate that 23 militias were now operating in the Baghdad area.

Early in the crackdown, American officials said they planned to extend it into Sadr City, the violent area of eastern Baghdad dominated by the Mahdi Army. But Mr. Maliki said recently that he had vetoed a request by the United States to move into Sadr City in force.

Tensions on the subject rose on Wednesday when Mr. Maliki ordered the release of a senior aide to Mr. Sadr who had been arrested on suspicion of complicity in death squads.

General Caldwell today declined to comment on the move, saying that “any limits the prime minister wants to impose on us, we have to abide by.”

The general also said that Mr. Maliki is pursuing strategic issues and “dialogues” and was “working at a much higher level.”

But the general said that the aide, Sheik Mazin al-Saidy, was released on the condition that he sign a promise not to participate in illegal activities.

The release had provoked a new wave of exasperation among American officials and military commanders, who have made little secret of their growing doubts about Mr. Maliki’s political will or ability to stop the killings.

Mr. Maliki returned to Baghdad on Wednesday without any clear breakthrough from his meeting in Najaf with Mr. Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered cleric.

Ayatollah Sistani, a peacemaker in previous confrontations between the American forces and Mr. Sadr, is widely viewed in Iraq as the only Shiite leader with the potential authority to subdue the Shiite militias.

As a leader of one of the Shiite religious blocs that lead the government, Mr. Maliki is regarded as a protégé of Ayatollah Sistani, but he is also politically indebted to Mr. Sadr, whose party holds a crucial bloc of seats in Iraq’s Parliament.

Mr. Maliki removed the country’s two most senior police commanders this week, in a major restructuring of the Shiite-led police forces, which have been widely accused of abetting death squads. American officials and some Iraqi leaders have demanded further changes.

But two news conferences in Najaf, one attended by Mr. Maliki and Mr. Sadr, and one attended by Mr. Maliki alone, produced no concrete agreements that might herald a truce by the Mahdi Army.

While Mr. Maliki cited “positive results” from his talks with Ayatollah Sistani and with Mr. Sadr, he offered no details. He said only that he had met with Ayatollah Sistani “so that that the security and political situation can be stabilized, and allow the government to turn its attention to reconstruction.”

“We are in a difficult security situation,” Mr. Maliki said. “All the political and religious figures in the country are talking about safeguarding our citizens and our homeland, stopping the bloodshed, and rebuilding the country. Everybody is waiting impatiently for these things.”

In his comments, Mr. Sadr, who rarely appears in public, restricted himself mainly to the broad disavowal of sectarian killings that he has made in the past, even as evidence has mounted of the Mahdi Army’s involvement in death-squad killings in Baghdad and elsewhere.

“I speak out now to condemn sectarianism of all kinds, including kidnapping and sectarian killing,” he said. “I call for the unity of all Iraqis, and Sunnis and Shiites to join together to rebuild Iraq and rescue the country from the seas of blood that are spilled every day.”

But the cleric, a volatile figure whose power rests on his command of thousands of militiamen and a political faction that provides a critical margin of support to the Maliki government in Parliament, rejected American demands for an early breakup of the militias, which have thrown the country into chaos.

“Only the Iraqi government has the right to act in these matters,” he said. “No one else has any right to intervene, neither the Americans nor any other country.”

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, declined to comment on the negotiations that led to the sheik’s release, but said the request, made by the prime minister himself, was part of a broader strategy to deal with Mr. Sadr politically.

“We believe there is room for political engagement with Moktada, and anything which would disrupt this political engagement will not be very constructive,” Mr. Rubaie said.

A fresh demonstration of the militias’ potential for destabilizing wide parts of the country came last weekend, when Shiite militiamen went on a killing rampage in and around the town of Balad, murdering 38 Sunnis in reprisal for the beheading by Sunni extremists of 19 Shiite workers.

Residents in the area said that some of the Shiite killers belonged to the Mahdi Army and had been dispatched from their stronghold in Shuala, where Sheik Saidy had been captured Tuesday.

And General Caldwell gave a new sense of the toll the continuing violence has taken on Iraq’s young security forces. He said that roughly 25,000 soldiers and police officers had been lost to service after being killed or wounded too badly to return to duty.

As a result, a batch of 10,000 new recruits is currently in training as replacements, and further batches of similar size are scheduled to begin training in December and February.

Kirk Semple reported from Baghdad and John O’Neil from New York. Reporting was contributed by Andy Lehren from New York, John F. Burns and Sabrina Tavernise from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Najaf and Balad.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 — The blackened shells of five cars still sit in front of the Church of the Virgin Mary here, stark reminders of a bomb blast that killed two people after a recent Sunday Mass.

In the northern city of Mosul, a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church was kidnapped last week. His church complied with his captors’ demands and put up posters denouncing recent comments made by the pope about Islam, but he was killed anyway. The police found his beheaded body on Wednesday.

Muslim fury over Pope Benedict XVI’s public reflections on Islam in Germany a month ago — when he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as calling Islam “evil and inhuman” — has subsided elsewhere, but repercussions continue to reverberate in Iraq, bringing a new level of threat to an already shrinking Christian population.

Several extremist groups threatened to kill all Christians unless the pope apologized. Sunni and Shiite clerics united in the condemnation, calling the comments an insult to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. In Baghdad, many churches canceled services after receiving threats. Some have not met since.

“After the pope’s statement, people began to fear much more than before,” said the Rev. Zayya Edward Khossaba, the pastor of the Church of the Virgin Mary. “The actions by fanatics have increased against Christians.”

Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq.

Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country’s largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

But since Mr. Hussein’s ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country’s liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims.

Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors.

Estimates of the resulting Christian exodus vary from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000, with most heading for Syria, Jordan and Turkey.

The number of Christians who remain is also uncertain. The last Iraqi census, in 1987, counted 1.4 million Christians, but many left during the 1990’s when sanctions squeezed the country. Yonadam Kanna, the lone Christian member of the Iraqi Parliament, estimated the current Christian population at roughly 800,000, or about 3 percent of the population. A Chaldean Catholic auxiliary bishop, Andreos Abouna, told a British charity over the summer that there were just 600,000 Christians left, according to the Catholic News Service.

At the Church of the Virgin Mary, Father Khossaba showed a visitor the baptism forms for parishioners leaving the country who need proof of their religious affiliation for visas. Some weeks he has filled out 50 of the forms, he said, and some weeks more.

Attendance on Sundays has dwindled to four dozen or so, he said; it used to be more than 500 on average, and on Easter Sundays, before the collapse of the Hussein government, more than 1,500. Not all the missing members have left, of course; some simply stay at home on Sundays because of fears for their safety.

Many Christians have relocated, changing neighborhoods or even cities. About a thousand Christian families, from Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere, have taken refuge in Ain Kawa, a small town outside the Kurdish city of Erbil, which has become an oasis for Christians, said the Rev. Yusuf Sabri, a priest at St. Joseph’s Chaldean Catholic Church there.

A Christian man with Baghdad license plates on his car who asked not to be identified said he had just arrived in Ain Kawa to inquire about moving there. A leaflet had been left at his home demanding he leave in three days. It bore the signature of Muhammad’s Army, a Sunni insurgent group.

“They regarded me as an agent for the crusaders,” he said.

Asaad Aziz, a 42-year-old Chaldean Catholic, is one of those trying to leave the country. After the ouster of Mr. Hussein, he bought a liquor store in a mostly Shiite neighborhood. Nine days after he opened, the store was bombed. Mr. Aziz was hospitalized for a month.

The employees rebuilt the store. But several months later, a note slipped under the door gave Mr. Aziz 48 hours to close.

“Otherwise, you will blame yourself,” it said.

Mr. Aziz closed. But after an unsuccessful stint at a friend’s printing company, he returned to the business he knew best, opening a liquor store in a mostly Christian neighborhood. Last month, a gunman riddled the new storefront with bullets as Mr. Aziz cowered in a back room.

He told another story: the teenage daughter of another Christian family he knows was kidnapped recently. The captors initially demanded a ransom, but later sarcastically said the pope was the only one who could release her. She was eventually killed.

“When the pope gave his statement, it destroyed any last hope that we had here,” said Mr. Aziz, who has forbidden his daughters, one in high school and the other in college, to return to school.

He recently went to the Turkish Embassy to inquire about a visa but was rebuffed. At this point, he said, he will go anywhere.

“We cannot practice our rituals and we cannot bring food home to our families,” he said. “That’s why I want to leave the country.”

Mosul, near the historic heart of Christianity in Iraq, has also become increasingly dangerous. The recently murdered priest, the Rev. Boulos Iskander Behnam, is just the latest member of the Christian community to be kidnapped or killed there.

Conditions have been especially bleak for Christians in Basra, the southern city that is dominated by radical Shiite militias. Christian women there often wear Muslim head scarves to avoid harassment from religious zealots trying to impose a strict Islamic dress code. After the pope’s statement, an angry crowd burned an effigy of him.

In Baghdad, Juliet Yusef attends St. George’s, the country’s lone Anglican church. She, too, now wears a head scarf anytime she ventures outside her neighborhood. “I am afraid of being attacked,” she said.

Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that was once heavily populated by Christians and has been plagued by sectarian violence, has now been mostly emptied of them. Christians were singled out there by insurgents who accused them of being friendly with the occupying Americans.

“They are Christian, we are Christian,” said one holdout, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Suzan. “They think most likely we know each other well.”

Two priests were kidnapped over the summer in Dora, although both were released, one after nearly a month.

Oddly, before the pope’s comments, as sectarian violence has escalated in Baghdad in the past year, some said the situation might have actually improved for Christians as Muslim militants turned their attention on one another.

Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad, who lives in Britain but visits Iraq frequently, said his driver was kidnapped recently but was promptly released after his Sunni Arab captors discovered he was a Christian. He said his captors apologized by saying, “We thought he was Shiite.”

“It must be the only occasion when being a Christian actually helped in this country,” he said.

Wisam H. Habeeb and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — President Bush’s chief spokesman conceded today that the latest carnage in Iraq was somewhat reminiscent of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which helped to turn public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia. But he said the president still envisioned victory in Iraq.

The surge in violence in Iraq is a reminder “that terrorists try to exploit pictures and try to use the media as conduits for influencing public opinion in the United States,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said as Mr. Bush prepared to campaign for Republicans today in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Mr. Snow fielded questions at a particularly delicate time: just after a senior American officer in Iraq said that the current approach to stemming the chaos in Baghdad was not working, and as the approaching Congressional elections are stoking fears of a Republican disaster because of the war.

Mr. Snow recalled that while the Tet offensive may have been the tipping point as far as American public opinion was concerned, it was later found to have been extremely costly for the Communists — arguably a “victory” for the United States military. But the American public was so tired of the war by that time that President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven into retirement, and Richard Nixon was elected in part on a pledge to end the conflict.

Asked if he saw a similar portent in Iraq, Mr. Snow replied: “No. The important thing to remember is the president’s determined to win.” The administration will “make adjustments as necessary,” Mr. Snow said, “but the one thing that nobody should have any doubt about is that we’re going to win.”

President Bush himself acknowledged the possible parallel between the Tet offensive and the bloodletting in Iraq, as suggested by Thomas L. Friedman in a column in The New York Times.

“He could be right,” Mr. Bush said on Wednesday in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.” Mr. Bush went on to say, “They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort.”

The White House has long resisted suggestions that, in embarking on a war in Iraq, the United States may be sliding into a Vietnam-like “quagmire.” Mr. Bush and his commanders have vowed to adjust tactics as needed in the drive to establish an Iraq that is free, stable and able to defend itself.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said today that the approach of concentrating on a limited number of troubled enclaves in Baghdad was not working as well as expected, and that the upsurge in violence in the Baghdad area was “disheartening.”

Mr. Snow, the White House spokesman, emphasized that he accepted the parallel with the Tet offensive only in a “very limited” context: an attempt by an enemy to influence American public opinion just before an election.

“We do not think that there’s been a flip-over point,” he said. “But more importantly, from the standpoint of the government and the standpoint of this administration, we are going to continue pursuing victory aggressively.” To do otherwise, the White House has said repeatedly, would be to allow Iraq to become a spawning ground for terrorists.

President Bush says he sees a possible parallel in the increase in violence in Iraq and the 1968 Tet offensive that prompted Americans to lose support for the Vietnam War.

But the White House on Thursday said the president had not been making the analogy that Iraq had reached a similar turning point. Instead, he was saying that insurgents were possibly increasing violence to try to influence coming U.S. elections.

Bush was asked in an ABC News interview on Wednesday whether he agreed with an opinion by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current violence in Iraq was "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive."

Bush responded: "He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

Bush and other top U.S. officials have long resisted comparisons to the Vietnam War when critics have suggested that Iraq has turned into a quagmire.

They also have stepped back from adamant declarations of progress as sectarian violence ratchets up, with more than 2,750 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Bush has taken a more flexible tone on Iraq, saying he is open to adjusting policy, as the November 7 elections approach with his Republican Party facing the possibility of losing control of the U.S. Congress over an unpopular war.

Communist forces lost the Tet offensive, but it was a major propaganda victory and is widely considered a turning point of the war in Vietnam, prompting support for the conflict to deteriorate. President Lyndon Johnson's popularity fell and he withdrew as a candidate for re-election in March 1968.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the president was not trying to say that it was the turning point in Iraq, as the Tet offensive has come to symbolize for Vietnam.

"That is not an analogy we're trying to make," Snow said. "We do not think that there's been a flip-over point, but more importantly from the standpoint of the government and the standpoint of this administration, we're going to continue pursuing victory aggressively."

Bush has maintained that Iraq is not embroiled in civil war and continues to insist that U.S. troops will not leave until Iraqis can take over security for their country.

Bush told ABC that not every American soldier would be out of Iraq before he leaves office in about two years. There are about 144,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq.

"Look, here's how I view it," Bush said. "First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence.

"They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw," he said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland)