ARAB-US RELATIONS - Dec 12- Bush Acknowledges About 30,000 Iraqis Have Died.

Pres Bush acknowledges for the first time that about 30,000 Iraqis had been killed in the war in Iraq. In response to a question after a speech on Iraq, Bush said: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis". The administration has previously resisted giving estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the March 2003 invasion. During the Vietnam war, estimates of the number of dead Vietnamese helped propel opposition to the war. Following his speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, White House aides said Bush was simply repeating figures cited in the media. Iraq Body Count, a UK-based group that tracks Iraqi deaths based on media reports, estimates that between 27,383 and 30,892 Iraqis have been killed. Bush, uncharacteristically, took questions following his remarks - the third of four planned speeches aimed at bolstering waning US domestic support for the war in Iraq. A recent CBS/New York Times poll found 59% of respondents disapproved of the way Bush was handling Iraq; 70% believed he had not developed a clear plan to get US troops out of Iraq despite the fact that the White House this month unveiled its strategy for victory there. One person asked why the administration continued to "invoke" 9/11 as justification for the war in Iraq despite a lack of evidence that such a link existed. Without directly responding to the question, Bush stated, "9/11 changed my look on foreign policy", adding that the US could not be complacent in the face of potential terrorist attacks. In his speech, Bush had said the the US "must recognise Iraq as the central front in the war on terror" because "the terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity". This idea has been attacked by critics who say Iraq became a magnet for al-Qaeda and its affiliates only after the US invasion. "Iraq is not the centre for terrorism", said John Murtha, a hawkish Democrat congressman who originally supported the war, in response to Bush's speech. Murtha last month escalated the domestic debate on when the US should withdraw from Iraq, saying troops should be brought back within six months. "Ninety-three per cent of the people fighting against us in Iraq - and we've become the enemy in Iraq - are Iraqis", said Murtha. Michael O'Hanlon, defence analyst at the liberal Brookings Institution, said Bush's estimate was "newsworthy" because the administration had previously tended to bundle any figures on Iraqi deaths with numbers of detainees, making it impossible to obtain data on deaths alone. "That is the sort of number we frequently use to on the one hand avoid the body count mentality of Vietnam but at the same time give some indication of tactical progress", said O'Hanlon. Gilbert Burnham, co-ordinator of the Johns Hopkins University centre for refugee and disaster response, said: [Mr Bush's estimate] is a legitimate attempt to note the reports of violent deaths related to conflict". In October 2004, Burnham and several colleagues were criticised by the administration after they released a study, which estimated the number of Iraqi deaths since the US-led invasion in March 2003 at 100,000. Burnham said the figure of 30,000 deaths was not out of step with his estimates, which he said also included deaths unrelated to the conflict. "There are really two sets of numbers and that's what people have had a hard time trying to understand", said Burnham. "I think [30,000] is very consistent with the kind of information that we have and there measuring things in a different way, they're measuring different events".