IMPEACH BUSH

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Washington's ambassador to Iraq hinted Sunday that the United States was open to granting amnesty to former Al-Qaeda insurgents who fought against it in the blood-soaked country.

"As part of a political reconciliation process, amnesty can be very important," Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Fox News television, speaking from Baghdad.

"It can also be important in this particular context as we seek to draw as many elements as we can away from the fight ... against us and into the fight against a common enemy, Al-Qaeda.

"In terms of individual cases involving people who have American blood on their hands, that is something we have to consider very carefully."

The number two head of US forces in Iraq, Raymond Odierno, said on Thursday that the US was discussing cease-fires with some Iraqi insurgent groups in an effort to reduce attacks on US and Iraqi government forces.

May was the third most deadly month for US forces in Iraq since they led the invasion in 2003 that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. Scores of civilians have been dying each week in insurgent attacks.

The man who led coalition forces in Iraq during the first year of the occupation, the retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, said recently that the United States could forget about winning the war in Iraq, and could hope only to "stave off defeat."

Sanchez was the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration fell short in Iraq.

Crocker claimed progress however in winning over pro-insurgent peoples to the side of the US-backed Iraqi government, but insisted it was too soon to judge whether the US "surge" strategy of pouring thousands more troops in to stabilize parts of Iraq was working.

"Tribes and others that at one point sided with, or at least were sympathetic to, Al-Qaeda very definitely have changed their position and are now supporting Iraqi and coalition efforts against Al-Qaeda," he said.

But he added: "The long-term process leading to what we all hope is eventual stabilization, security and political accommodation ... will take a lot longer than September," when Crocker and the top US general in Iraq, David Petraeus, are to report to Washington on progress.

Bush last month secured a multi-billion dollar budget to fund the war through September, and more troops are yet to arrive in Iraq under his "surge" strategy launched in January.

But senior members of Congress in Washington, both Democrat and Republican, have voiced expectations that Bush will be pressured into changing course later this year, possibly reducing troop numbers from September.

The funding bill demands that Iraq's government meet political "benchmarks" to demonstrate progress.

Iraq's President Jalal Talabani meanwhile Sunday confirmed the Iraqi government was negotiating with "national resistance" members to whom he was prepared to give amnesty.

"Then only al-Qaeda will remain as the main criminal terrorist group and it will be easy to eradicate it," he told ABC news.

"People are ready now to fight against -- to cooperate, against terrorism, and to cooperate with Iraqi armed forces ... when this Iraqi so-called national resistance movement will be convinced to come to the political process, the task of eradicating Al-Qaeda terrorist group will be easier."

Talabani expressed optimism about Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Iraqi Shiite cleric and head of the Mahdi Army, Iraq's biggest militia, accused of carrying out sectarian attacks against Sunnis.

Sadr's movement "announced that they will ... support political process, very peaceful, and he asked his followers not to fight against Iraqi soldiers," Talabani said, though he warned that Sadr had "lost control of some of his militia."

He also insisted Iraq's government had made "good steps forward for national reconciliation," including resistance fighters who were joining the political process.

He said he expected that the Iraq army would be ready to defend the country by the end of 2008, but that US forces would continue to have "a long-term presence" there.

Crocker also stressed that progress would take time.

"There are two times out there, two clocks, an Iraqi clock and an American clock," he said. "And the American clock is running quite a bit faster than the Iraqi one."