LONDON — Britain's army chief, who set off a political storm by calling for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq "soon," said today he meant a phased withdrawal over two or three years, and denied that he was attacking government policy.

Gen. Richard Dannatt gave a series of interviews after newspapers ran front-page stories interpreting his remarks published Thursday by The Daily Mail as a critique of Prime Minister Tony Blair's policy.

Dannatt said in the initial interview that the British military should "get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems."

This morning, he insisted Britain stood "shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, and their timing and our timing are one and the same."

"We'll probably reduce our soldiers over the course of the next year or two or three — let's wait and see. That's what I mean by sometime soon," Dannatt said in an interview with Sky News.

"We don't do surrender. We don't pull down white flags. We're going to see this through," Dannatt said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Britain has not set a timetable for the departure of its 7,500 troops from Iraq, but it has handed over security responsibilities in two provinces to Iraqi forces and is preparing to do the same in a third.

Blair's official spokesman told reporters in Scotland, where Blair is involved in Northern Ireland talks, that the general had the prime minister's full support.

While insisting that Britain would stay the course in Iraq, Dannatt told the BBC: "We need to keep thinking about time because time is against us. Because time is money, time is particularly soldiers and soldiers' lives, and we cannot go on forever."