President Bush said there should be no definitive timetable for the withdrawal of Coalition forces from Iraq, according to a British Sunday newspaper.

Asked by the Observer newspaper about reports that Britain was preparing plans for the reduction of its forces in Iraq, Bush said he did not want the issue tied to a formal schedule.

“There should be no definitive timetable,” Bush was quoted as saying. “I am confident that he (Brown), like me, will listen to our commanders to make sure that the sacrifices that have gone forward won’t be unravelled by drawdowns that may not be warranted at this point in time.”

Bush added that he looked forward to speaking with Brown about the issue.

The British Broadcasting Corp. has reported that Britain could set a date for the withdrawal of its soldiers from Iraq within months. The BBC said Defense Secretary Des Browne was likely to announce the exit of some troops before Britain’s Parliament breaks for a summer recess on July 22, and that a final announcement on withdrawing all its forces would be made by the end of the year.

The military called the BBC’s report “pure speculation.”

Britain has some 4,000 troops serving in southern Iraq confined to a base on the outskirts of the city of Basra. The military planned to withdraw an additional 1,500 troops from the country, but those plans were shelved after the city was rocked by an upsurge in violence in Basra in March. Browne said in April that withdrawals were unlikely, a point noted by Bush in his interview.

Britain began drawing down its forces in early 2007, even as Bush was pouring 21,000 more troops into Iraq as part of the so-called “surge.” The withdrawal caused friction between the U.S. and Britain _ one architect of the surge, former U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane, last year warned that U.S. forces might have to fill the gap left by the British in Basra.

The Observer newspaper cast its interview with Bush as a warning to Brown over further British troop reductions, but the White House insisted that the two leaders _ who are due to meet for dinner Sunday evening _ were in complete accord.

“There is no daylight between the United States and the United Kingdom on the strategy for Iraq,” Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Sunday in Paris where he was traveling with Bush. A senior adminstration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record about this issue, said Bush didn’t give Brown any kind of warning.

Brown’s Downing Street office concurred, saying it was not British policy to set “arbitrary timetables.”

Bush and Brown are due to hold talks Monday morning before the president visits Northern Ireland, the last stop on his weeklong trip through Europe.

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Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann in Paris contributed to this report