President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were due to discuss Iraq in Washington today.
Mr Bush and Mr Blair are not expected to announce any schedule for the withdrawal of their 140,000, mostly US, troops.
But facing domestic pressure over an increasingly unpopular war, both governments are keen to see progress on the ground so that they can begin sending home soldiers facing daily attacks by insurgents seeking to force them out.
They count on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, sworn in last Saturday at the helm of a national unity government, to start tackling insurgent and sectarian violence that has killed thousands since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Yesterday the new prime minister said Iraqi forces could take over security by the end of 2007.
But in a new reminder of the uphill struggle Mr Maliki faces, gunmen shot and seriously wounded a senior Defence Ministry official in Baghdad, in what appeared to be part of a campaign to target the top echelons of Iraq's US-backed administration.
The shooting of the official and his driver occurred a day after another prominent security official was killed in the Iraqi capital. A deputy chief of Baghdad municipality's protection units was shot dead yesterday morning.
They were the latest attacks on senior figures in Iraq's US-trained forces expected to gradually take over security from occupying troops.