BAGHDAD — An Iraqi journalist for one of the Middle East’s best-known satellite television stations escaped assassination yesterday when a bomb was found under the seat of his car as he prepared to leave home for work.

The attempt against the Baghdad bureau manager for Al-Arabiya television, Jawad al-Hattab, illustrates the dangers facing Iraq despite the decline in violence.

President Bush cited those dangers when he announced yesterday that he would keep American troop strength mostly intact through 2008.

Mr. Hattab’s driver and a security guard discovered the laptop-sized bomb as they waited to pick up the correspondent at his home in central Baghdad, according to the station’s executive editor, Nabil Khatib.

The two moved away from the car and summoned police but the device exploded before they arrived, heavily damaging the vehicle and setting it on fire, Mr. Khatib said.

“It appears that it was timed to explode while al-Hattab was driving to the office,” Mr. Khatib said, calling the blast “an attempt on his life and an attack against the station.”

Al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is among the most popular Arabic TV news stations and has been criticized by Iraqi hard-liners who believe it is too pro-Western.

“Some [Web] sites describe us as renegades and collaborators with the Americans,” an an Al-Arabiya correspondent, Majid Hameed, who was detained by the Americans in September 2005 and released without charge four months later.

The attempted bombing occurred as the Emirates’ new ambassador to Baghdad, Abdullah Ibrahim al-Shehhi, took up his post — the first fully accredited Arab ambassador here since the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.