WASHINGTON, 6 December 2006 — Robert Gates, the White House choice to be the next defense secretary, conceded yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and warned that if that country is not stabilized in the next year or two it could lead to a “regional conflagration.”

At the outset of his Senate confirmation hearing to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld, Gates said he is open to new ideas about correcting the US course in Iraq, which he said would be his highest priority if confirmed as expected.

Gates, 63, said he believes President George W. Bush wants to see Iraq improve to the point where it can govern and defend itself, while seeking a new approach. “What we are now doing is not satisfactory,” Gates said.

“In my view, all options are on the table, in terms of how we address this problem in Iraq,” he added.

Asked point-blank by Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat, whether the US is winning in Iraq, Gates replied, “No, sir.”

Much of the hearing’s questioning focused on whether Gates would provide independent advice to Bush, and the former CIA director assured the committee that he would not shirk from that duty.

Sen. John McCain, a Republican and a likely 2008 presidential candidate and an advocate of increasing US troop strength in Iraq, asked whether Gates believes the US had too few troops at the outset of the war in 2003.

“I suspect in hindsight some of the folks in the administration would not make the same decisions they made,” including the number of troops in Iraq to establish control after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Gates said.

He also told Levin he believes a political solution in Iraq is required to end the violence.

“Our course over the next year or two will determine whether the American and Iraqi people and the next president of the United States will face a slowly but steadily improving situation in Iraq and in the region or will face the very real risk, and possible reality, of a regional conflagration,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“It seems to me that the United States is going to have to have some kind of presence in Iraq for a long time... but it could be with a dramatically smaller number of US forces than are there today,” Gates said.

He said his biggest worry on Iraq is that if US forces departed while the country was in chaos, then predominantly Sunni Arab countries in the region would intervene, further complicating the sectarian strife there.

“The Turks would not sit idly by if they saw Iraq beginning to fall apart,” Gates said. Referring to the likelihood of Iran and other countries stepping into the chaos, he added, “All of that could spread rather dramatically.”

Meanwhile, Bush was getting an in-person preview yesterday of a prestigious blue-ribbon panel’s recommendations for a new way forward in Iraq. Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, was giving the president a preview about “the direction of the report,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

Snow said that Baker, however, was not leaving behind the full report or getting into too many specifics. The entire commission is to meet with Bush today to do that, he said.