Senior US officials said President Bush met with General John Abizaid at the White House and will hold a broader meeting on Saturday with his national security team.
White House spokesman Tony Snow sought to dampen down a growing sense of crisis, insisting it had been "on the schedule for weeks" while Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the meeting was "nothing unusual."
Crisis in Amarah
However, the war room discussions came as Iraqi police battled Shiite militia for control of Amarah, a city that had recently been turned over to Iraqi security forces, and a day after a top US general acknowledged that a campaign to secure Baghdad had failed to dampen sectarian violence.
The latest fighting, in the southern city of Amarah, strikes directly at the US strategy of progressively turning over relatively secure areas to Iraqi security forces, thereby allowing the withdrawal of US and coalition forces.
British troops had turned over security for the city to Iraqi forces in August.
On Friday, Shiite militia aligned with radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fought pitched battles with police in the city, setting police stations ablaze and leaving 18 dead.
Rumsfeld denies strategic error
Mr Rumsfeld vehemently denied that the decision to turn over the city to Iraqi security forces was a "strategic error," insisting that it was at best a misjudgement.
"It is never going to be a straight, smooth, steady path. And this may happen in the future," he said.
"The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, instead of developing strength and capacity and
competence," he said.
Death toll mounts
The growing sense of crisis comes as the top American commander in Iraq, General Casey, has ordered a review of a US-led crackdown in Baghdad, amid a sharp spike in the death toll this month.
It also comes amidst growing calls by Republican lawmakers for a change of course in Iraq which have mounted ahead of US midterm elections on November 7.
Opposition Democrats, who hope to win control of Congress in the election, have called on President Bush to revise his Iraq strategy and convene an international conference to support a political settlement in Iraq.