Senator Clinton said yesterday the Iraqi Parliament should replace embattled Prime Minister al-Maliki with a “less divisive and more unifying figure” to reconcile political and religious factions.

Mrs. Clinton, the 2008 Democratic presidential front-runner, made her comments the same day President Bush reaffirmed his support for Mr. Maliki before a veterans’ convention in Kansas City, Mo.

In a statement released by her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton echoed a call by the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin, for Iraq’s Parliament to oust Mr. Maliki in favor of a leader who could restore order to Iraq’s unity government.

“During his trip to Iraq last week, Senator Levin … confirmed that the Iraqi government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I share Senator Levin’s hope that the Iraqi Parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks.”

Mrs. Clinton voted in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq and has since become a staunch critic of the conflict. She traveled to Iraq just before beginning her presidential campaign in January and expressed reservations about Mr. Maliki’s leadership upon her return. In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Mr. Bush reiterated support for Mr. Maliki a day after expressing frustration with the Iraqi leader’s inability to bridge political divisions in his country.

“I support him,” Mr. Bush said. “It’s not up to the politicians in Washington, D.C., to say whether he will remain in his position. It is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy and not a dictatorship.”

Mrs. Clinton was criticized by some of her Democratic rivals Monday after she told the VFW that new military tactics including a troop increase in Iraq’s Anbar province appeared to be working. In her statement yesterday, she said the American military had performed “magnificently” in Iraq but Iraq’s divisions require a political solution.

“Our best hope of fostering political progress in Iraq is to begin the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops,” she said.

[In other Iraq news, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that an American Blackhawk helicopter crash yesterday killed all 14 troops on board, and a powerful truck bomb in north-central Iraq killed at least 51 Iraqis.

It was a day of many reminders of all that is dysfunctional in Iraq and all that is at stake. With Baghdad suffering through its fifth summer with little more than a couple of hours of electricity each day to run fans and refrigerators, Electricity Minister Waheed Kareem said it probably will be another three or four years before power needs can be fully met.

At least half a dozen roadside bombs detonated near American or Iraqi forces, including one that killed an Iraqi policeman on a platform in a traffic rotary in Tikrit and three that hit passing American convoys in Baghdad. No American military reports were issued on the Baghdad explosions, although witnesses said there appeared to have been casualties in at least two of the blasts.

One American soldier died in western Baghdad during combat operations to clean out cells that support insurgents, the military reported. Sweeps of suspected hideouts and munitions workshops have been the focus of a troop buildup that has swelled the American military presence in Iraqi to more than 160,000.

The recent fatalities brought to 3,722 the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, according to www.icasualties.org.