As U.S. President George W. Bush is preparing to sell his troop increase in Iraq during his State of the Union address Tuesday night, more Republican lawmakers have voiced opposition to the plan.

In the Senate on Monday, John Warner of Virginia, former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, joined fellow Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota in producing non-binding legislation expressing disagreement with Bush's Iraq plan, and their announcement brings to five the number of Senate Republicans publicly opposed to the plan.

The proposal by Warner, Collins and Coleman, along with Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, was offered as an alternative to an Iraq resolution backed by Democratic leaders and is to be debated this week by the Foreign Relations Committee.

"The American G. I. was not trained, not sent over there - certainly not by resolution of this institution - to be placed in the middle of a fight between the Sunni and the Shia and the wanton and just incomprehensible killing that's going on at this time," Warner said.

"We've had four other surges since we first went into Iraq," said Collins. "None of them produced a long-lasting change in the situation on the ground. So I am very skeptical," she said.

The Warner proposal and the resolution introduced last week by Democrat Senators Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and Carl Levin of Michigan, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, are similar in many respects. Both are non-binding but declare that United States involvement in Iraq cannot be sustained without strong public support and that the main military mission in Iraq should be ensuring the nation's territorial integrity.

In the House, members of the Republican leadership drafted a series of what they called "strategic benchmarks" and said the White House should submit monthly reports to Congress measuring progress, the USA Today reported.

Under a plan announced Monday by Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, and other senior Republicans, Bush would be required to provide monthly reports on progress in meeting goals in Iraq beginning this month.

Bush is expected to highlight flexibility in education standards, alternatives to oil as a way to reduce "greenhouse gases" and new tax breaks for health insurance in the speech, his first before a Democratic-controlled Congress.

The president is to present his plan to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance in part by financially rewarding states that make basic private policies more widely available. There are 47 million Americans without health insurance.

As early as next week, the full Senate could open the most extensive Iraq debate to be conducted in more than four years, and the proposal unveiled Monday was fashioned to be more palatable to moderate Democrats and Republicans because it seeks to employ recommendations from the Iraq Study Group and offers guidelines to establish a military strategy, The New York Times said.

Editor: Yan