(Adds six U.S. soldiers killed, paragraph 4) By Paul Eckert WASHINGTON, April 1 (Reuters) - The White House accused Democrats on Sunday of taking a chance on worsening the hardship facing U.S. troops in Iraq by delaying passage of a bill to fund the unpopular war. White House counselor Dan Bartlett criticized Congress for going on recess before finishing the wartime funding bill, which U.S. President George W. Bush has vowed to veto if it sets a timetable for pulling U.S. combat troops out of Iraq. "By mid-May, troops in Iraq, serving Iraq, would potentially have to have their deployments extended because they're not getting their job done right here," Bartlett told ABC's "This Week" television program. In Iraq, six U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend southwest of Baghdad, the military said in a statement, two by an explosion during a patrol on Saturday and four by an improvised bomb on Sunday near a unit responding to the earlier attack. A British soldier died on Sunday after an attack on a patrol in Basra in the south, and two suicide truck bombs killed two people and wounded 17 when they exploded at an Iraqi Army base east of the northern city of Mosul, police said. Funding bills for the war have become a test of Bush's determination to retain control over Iraq policy, which is being challenged by a newly assertive Democratic-controlled Congress confident that voters want U.S. troops to come home. Democrats have added conditions to the money, including setting timetables for withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq. Bush wants the money without the conditions. Bartlett cited remarks by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to a House of Representatives panel on Thursday that after April 15, without emergency funding, the Army would have to begin curtailing some troop training. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that if the funds were not approved by May 15, the Army might have to extend some soldiers' tours because other units would not be ready, and reduce equipment repair work, among other things. Bartlett said those concerns were valid despite a Congressional Research Service memo dated March 28 and sent to the Senate Budget Committee that said the Army could finance war operations through most of July. "What they said is that there would have to be moving of accounts, moving of money through accounts," he said of the Congressional Research Service report, which some critics said undermined Bush's assertion that Congress was harming the war effort by holding up funds. Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told the ABC program that the bills passed in the Senate and House containing a timetable "come to the same conclusion: It's time for American troops to start coming back home in an orderly basis. We believe that this war should come to an end." BUSH ALLY BREAKS RANKS In the latest sign of what critics see as Bush's growing isolation over the war, the chief strategist of his 2004 re-election said he had lost faith in Bush over Iraq and other issues and that it was time to withdraw U.S. troops. "If the American public says they're done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want," Matthew Dowd told The New York Times in an interview on Sunday. "They're saying, 'Get out of Iraq.'" The Times said Dowd was the first member of Bush's inner circle to break so publicly with him. Rejecting calls for a withdrawal, Bush is sending 30,000 more troops to Iraq in an effort to regain control of security and reduce sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war. The number of murders in Baghdad has fallen as U.S. troops have joined Iraqi forces in sweeping neighborhoods and setting up outposts in a major security crackdown. But there was still a 13 percent rise in violent deaths in March from the previous month to 1,861, Iraqi government tallies showed on Sunday. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, a strong supporter of Bush's new plan, toured a Baghdad market on Sunday and said the reduction in violence in the capital was among reasons for "cautious optimism." The former Vietnam prisoner of war said security had improved markedly since his last visit and that the media was not telling Americans the "good news" about the war. "That is not to say things are well everywhere in Iraq. Far from it, we have a long way to go," he told reporters. An unidentified British soldier died of gunshot wounds suffered in the Basra attack, the British Ministry of Defence said in a statement, bringing to 135 the number of British troops killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. More than 3,200 U.S. troops have been killed.
