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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — U.S.-led forces captured a senior al Qaeda leader who was responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths and housed foreign fighters who carried out suicide bombings, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

The leader, who was not identified, was arrested in a raid in Mosul on December 14, the military said in a statement.

“The terrorist leader was attempting to flee from the location when Coalition Forces chased him across a street and detained him,” the statement said.

It said the suspect served as al Qaeda’s military chief in Mosul in 2005, and then took up the same job in western Baghdad.

“During that time, he coordinated car vehicle-borne improvised explosives device attacks and kidnap for ransom operations in Baghdad,” the military said. It cited reports that said he organized an attempt to shoot down a U.S. military helicopter in May this year.

“After a few months he fled Baghdad due to Coalition Forces closing in on him,” the statement said.

The military said the capture would lead them closer to Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who took over as leader of al Qaedda in Iraq after his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi government’s national security adviser, said this month that 60 percent of al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership has now been captured or killed.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The White House is considering an expansion of the U.S. Army and Marines for “the long struggle against radicals and extremists,” President Bush said during a Wednesday news conference.

Bush would not elaborate on where that struggle would take place, only that he wanted to ensure that the U.S. military “stays in the fight for a long period of time.”

“I’m not predicting any particular theater, but I am predicting that it’s going to take a while for the ideology of liberty to finally triumph over the ideology of hate,” he said. (Watch why Bush believes “we’re going to win” Video)

The president has asked new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who visited military commanders in Iraq on Wednesday, to report back on how to expand the military.

“We can be smarter about how we deploy our manpower and resources. We can ask more of our Iraqi partners, and we will,” Bush said. “I believe that we’re going to win. I believe that. And by the way, if I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have our troops there.”

Bush said that if the Iraqis “stand up, step up and lead,” then the U.S. military can help them achieve victory there.

“It’s their responsibility to govern their country. It’s their responsibility to do the hard work necessary to secure Baghdad. And we want to help them.”

The president also acknowledged that the securing of Iraq is made more difficult by the insurgent and sectarian violence there, but he insisted that the United States would not be pushed out of the region.

“I want the enemy to understand that this is a tough task, but they can’t run us out of the Middle East — that they can’t intimidate America,” he said. “They think they can. They think it’s just a matter of time before America grows weary and leaves, abandons the people of Iraq, for example. And that’s not going to happen.” (Watch why Bush believes a larger Army is in order Video)

Bush rejected the idea that expanding the size of the military would contradict former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s calls for “a lighter, agile Army,” saying that he was more concerned about “increasing end strength” for the Army and Marines.

Asked if he would overrule his own military commanders if they opposed a plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, Bush called the question a “dangerous hypothetical.”

“Let me wait and gather all the recommendations from Bob Gates, from our military, from diplomats on the ground interested in the Iraqis’ point of view and then I’ll report back to you as to whether or not I support a surge or not.”

Bush said he understands that the American people are troubled by the violence, but he emphasized that victory is still achievable in Iraq.

“I also don’t believe most Americans want us just to get out now,” he said. “A lot of Americans understand the consequences of retreat. Retreat would embolden radicals. It would hurt the credibility of the United States.” (Watch how not even children can escape the violence in Iraq Video)

However, the president said, he will not propose sending more troops to Iraq without a clear purpose.

“There’s got to be a specific mission that can be accomplished with the addition of more troops before, you know, I agree on that strategy,” he said.

Bush’s remarks came as he appeared to say for the first time that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq, adopting the view of Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bush told The Washington Post in Wednesday’s editions, “I think an interesting construct that Gen. Pace uses is, ‘We’re not winning, we’re not losing.’ ”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Tony Snow said increasing troop levels was an option under consideration, but that the president had made no concrete decisions on changing his Iraq policy. (Watch how increasing troop levels must involve more than “thickening the mix” Video)

Snow also downplayed the notion that Bush was at loggerheads with the Joint Chiefs over the proposal to increase troops. According to some accounts, the White House is pushing the idea of a surge in troops and the Joint Chiefs oppose it.

“I think people are trying to create a fight between the president and the Joint Chiefs when one does not exist,” Snow said at a White House briefing. “What I’m saying is this budding narrative of the president locking horns with the Joint Chiefs is totally inaccurate.”

Bush said in the Post interview that he plans to expand the overall size of the U.S. military and is considering a short-term surge in troops in Iraq.

Bush has said he will reveal a new strategy for Iraq next month after considering the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and consulting with Pentagon officials and others.

The president delivered his remarks as Gates arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit to meet with military leaders and other officials.

Gates met Wednesday with Gens. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, and George Casey, the top general in Iraq.

The defense chief was scheduled to meet Thursday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

As he headed for Iraq, Gates said the trip’s purpose was to “go out, listen to the commanders, talk to the Iraqis and see what I can learn. … I expect to learn a lot.”

The Pentagon says injuries and deaths among U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq rose 32% during the period from mid-August to mid-October over the previous three months. Both the average number of attacks each week and the average number of people killed or wounded in those attacks were at their highest levels since the United States handed over power to the Iraqi government in June 2004.

The rise of ethnic and sectarian militias and other armed groups drove the increased violence, the Pentagon report says. The militia led by anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has replaced al-Qaeda as the biggest security threat in Iraq, it says. Death squads are continuing to target civilians, sometimes with help from the Iraqi security forces.

The Pentagon says the situation in Iraq is “far more complex than the term ‘civil war’ implies.”

“However, conditions that could lead to civil war do exist, especially in and around Baghdad,” and the Iraqi people are fearful of civil war, the report says.

Robert Gates was sworn in as Defense secretary Monday, replacing Donald Rumsfeld, who had often bristled at the suggestion that Iraq might be sliding into civil war. Gates has been less upbeat, telling senators earlier this month he believed the United States was neither winning nor losing in Iraq. Gates said he’d visit Iraq soon.

About 322,000 Iraqi soldiers, police and other security forces have been trained and equipped, the report says, though the number actually working is probably much lower. One major problem, the report says, is that many Iraqi security officers do not report for duty. About 20,000 Iraqi soldiers have been killed or otherwise left the military since 2003, the report says.

Still, the Pentagon says it plans to continue handing over control of security to Iraqi forces and step up its efforts to train and advise the Iraqis. As the Iraqi forces become more capable and security improves, the report says, “coalition forces will move out of the cities, reduce the number of bases from which they operate and conduct fewer visible missions.”

Iraq’s economy continues to struggle, the report says. Inflation from October 2005 to October 2006 was 54%, unemployment remained high, and the country averaged only 11 hours of electricity per day. Organized crime and drug smuggling also are rising, the report says.

Also Monday:

•The Iraqi Red Crescent shut its Baghdad operations a day after gunmen seized 30 of the aid group’s workers and volunteers. Sixteen guards, drivers and other workers, along with two visitors and three guards from the neighboring Dutch Embassy, were released after several hours, the Red Crescent said.

•A car bomb near a vegetable market killed five people and wounded at least 19 in a Sunni area of Sadiya, police said. Late Monday, police said they had found 44 bodies throughout the capital.

•The U.S. military announced the deaths of three more Americans, raising to 60 the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq this month.

Contributing: The Associated Press

By Matt Kelley, USA TODAY

A researcher associated with a brand new mortality study is blunt to critics: ‘Its accuracy is not an issue … those who publicly dismiss the findings must offer an alternative.’

The new mortality survey of Iraq that estimates 600,000 deaths by violence is startling and should alter the way America thinks about this war.

The John Hopkins University researchers were meticulous about the methods used to randomly choose the survey sites and analyze the data. It is state-of-the-art work, and its accuracy is not an issue. The survey is the only scientific account of the war dead. There is no other, and those who publicly dismiss the findings must offer an alternative. There is none. Every other account is deeply flawed in method, and this one is not. It is standard in epidemiology and disaster response.

The survey, which my Center helped organize, is available here.

Just two weeks ago, the Washington Post published a survey of Iraqi attitudes toward the United States and the war. The survey, conducted by the State Department, revealed that enormous majorities blamed the United States for the violence and wanted us to leave Iraq. Another poll from the University of Maryland published the next day confirmed that sentiment and also reported that 60 percent of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops. The Johns Hopkins mortality survey and these polls go hand-in-hand. The Iraqi attitudes are difficult to grasp unless the violence people suffer is an enormous, daily threat to them.

The implications of this level of mayhem are profound. Most obviously, the United States is not providing security. It is not viewed by the Iraqi people as doing so, and the death rate confirms why these attitudes are so firmly held. The “mission” is not being accomplished, and if trend lines are an indication, the mission is deteriorating rapidly. The debate about withdrawing must be waged in this context.

It is conceivable that the application of force by the U.S. military is making things worse. Again, this is what Iraqis believe. A number of explanations for the violence see insurgent action in particular as “defensive” — that is, the insurgents believe they are defending their communities. Because the United States went in with a relatively small number of troops, more force was applied to compensate for those inadequate numbers. (That does not mean, however, that larger numbers would have changed the course of the war.) This strategy has perhaps stirred the insurgency as much as any other plausible factor, and the growing violence then generates itself in a giant feedback loop: the United States attacks a village where they think insurgents are harbored, and this produces more insurgents who then act violently, exacting a new U.S. military response, and so on and so on.

Many of the journalistic accounts of the war, such as Thomas Ricks’ “Fiasco,” suggest that this may be what is occurring. At the same time, journalists are only seeing a tiny fraction of what goes on in Baghdad, what Dexter Filkins of the New York Times describes as 2 percent of the entire country, and thus their scope is very limited in seeing the violence, accounting for the dead, or drawing out the broader meaning. As a result, we have very little understanding of how the violence affects everything — politics, ethnic and sectarian divisions, the hundreds of thousands displaced (another invisible statistic), the many thousands leaving Iraq in droves, the deterioration of the public health care system, and every other dimension of life and death in Iraq.

This is what we need to concentrate on as the discussion of the mortality survey unfolds. Even if there were a large sampling error in the survey — which there does not seem to be — the numbers would be colossal in scale. And it is the meaning of these colossal numbers that we must debate. We now have empirical evidence of the scale of this human disaster. In that light, what is best for Iraq? How can such violence be ended? How can the United States carve out a constructive role from the ruins of its intervention?

Let’s honor the dead of Iraq by grappling realistically with their tragedy and forge a way to ensure that this horrific human cost does not continue to mount.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.