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Bush Denies Iraq Civil War Threat    [

    At Least 75 Dead in String of Attacks in Iraq
    By Edward Wong
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 28 February 2006

    Baghdad - At least 75 Iraqis were killed in a maelstrom of violence today as insurgents carried out one of their deadliest offensives in weeks. The vast majority of the victims died in five powerful bombings in Baghdad that threatened to heighten tensions as Iraqis were still struggling to recover from the worst sectarian bloodletting of the war.

    Though politicians and clerics have been calling for calm, and a weekend curfew had kept residents off the streets, people across the capital remained anxious today over the possibility of a new outbreak of sectarian violence, with militiamen and private guards stationed around mosques. The American ambassador declared that last week's killings had pushed Iraq "to the brink of civil war." The Iraqi Cabinet said in the afternoon that as of 4 p.m. 379 people had died and 458 had been injured since the bombing last Wednesday of a sacred Shiite shrine and the anti-Sunni reprisal killings that followed.

    At a courthouse in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, Iraqi prosecutors presented their strongest evidence against Saddam Hussein so far, presenting documents that appear to directly link Mr. Hussein to the executions of 148 men and teenage boys from the Shiite village of Dujail.

    After meeting with the country's most powerful cleric, the Iraqi national security adviser warned that elected leaders would take "a few months" to form a new, four-year government, and that the negotiations would proceed along a "rough road with a lot of political mines in our way." The talks are in the embryonic stages, and American and Iraqi officials fear that bitter, prolonged negotiations will undermine faith in the politicians, reinforce sectarian divisions and strengthen the insurgency.

    The Bush administration is gambling that the political process will help stabilize Iraq, and provide an exit for some of the 130,000 American troops here, by drawing in recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, who are leading the insurgency.

    In Washington President Bush, meeting with reporters before departing for a five-day trip to India and Pakistan, said: "The people of Iraq and their leaders must make a choice. The choice is chaos or unity. The choice is a free society or a society dictated by evil people who will kill innocents."

    The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said today in testimony before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on threats to national security, that the Iraqi government was still functioning and religious leaders have largely been a force for restraint.

    Asked for his benchmark definition for civil war in Iraq, Mr. Negroponte said it would involve complete loss of central government security control, and disintegration or deterioration of security forces with unauthorized militias gaining the upper hand.

    Mr. Negroponte said in answer to a question about whether neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran could get involved and side with the Sunni and Shiite sides, leading to a larger conflict in the Middle East, in the event of civil war, that it was a "possibility."

    The British military said two soldiers were killed today when their patrol was ambushed in the southern city of Amara, and the American military said a soldier was killed by small-arms fire in Baghdad in the morning. At least 2,296 American troops have died in the war.

    The trial of Mr. Hussein unfolded on television as blast after blast rocked the capital, raining debris across entire blocks and flooding hospital wards with lacerated victims. After one car bomb exploded at noon in a Shiite district of downtown Baghdad, firefighters and witnesses struggled to pry two blackened bodies from the front seats of a charred sedan. The wailing crowd lifted the bodies out, shouted "God is great!" and marched down the street bearing the corpses aloft.

    Nuns from a nearby convent rushed toward the flaming wrecks of cars clutching metal buckets of water.

    "I'm going to sell my restaurant because I want to leave Iraq," said Nour Sabah, 52, as he watched from the sidewalk, standing atop shards of glass. "They just want to destroy the lives of people. They don't want Iraqi people to live ordinary lives."

    An Interior Ministry official said that at least 4 people had been killed and 16 injured in that bombing. Earlier, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a gasoline station in the Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing at least 23 people and injuring 51. The deadliest attack took place in the evening, when a car bomb exploded by a marketplace in the northern Hurriyah neighborhood, killing at least 25 and wounding at least 43.

    The sectarian clashes that flared last week subsided only after the government imposed a strict curfew over the capital and three provinces last weekend, and after Iraqi leaders from all the major political groups and sects had called for restraint.

    "I think the country came to the brink of civil war," the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said in an interview on CNN. "But Iraqis decided that they didn't want to go down that path and came together."

    Mr. Khalilzad's statement was the most explicit acknowledgment so far by a Bush administration official of the degree to which sectarian strife had destabilized the country last week. It also contradicts statements from American generals last week asserting that Iraq was nowhere near spiraling down into civil war.

    The Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said today that security forces had arrested 10 people in connection to the bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra, which houses the tombs of two revered Shiite imams. Four of those detained were guards at the shrine, and six were terrorists, Mr. Rubaie said. He declined to give more details on the investigation.

    Mr. Rubaie, a conservative Shiite, made his comments in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq after meeting there with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq. The two had apparently discussed the recent wave of violence and the slow, troubled negotiations over the formation of the new government.

    "I expect we will go down a rough road with a lot of political mines in our way to forming a new government, and I think the formation will take a few months, so I ask our people to be patient," Mr. Rubaie said.

    The main Sunni Arab bloc had announced their intention last week to boycott talks to form a government, following the anti-Sunni reprisal killings, but has said it is ready to re-engage with the Shiites and Kurds. Their leaders say they want to make sure the Shiite-dominated government meets a promise to return seized mosques to the Sunnis. Leading politicians are discussing how to set up a mechanism for the multiparty negotiations.

    -------

    Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and a New York Times employee contributed from Najaf, and Christine Hauser contributed from New York.

 

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    Bush Denies Iraq Civil War Threat
    Reuters

    Tuesday 28 February 2006

    Washington - President George W. Bush, hit by polls showing America's support for the Iraq war at an all-time low, denied on Tuesday Iraq was sliding into civil war, despite the worst sectarian strife since a U.S.-led invasion.

    The decline in Bush's public approval ratings came as he told Iraqis they faced a choice between "chaos or unity" amid violence that has dented U.S. hopes for the stability needed to pave the way for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

    At least 60 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in the latest in a series of deadly attacks following the bombing of a major Shi'ite mosque last week.

    Asked what Washington would do if civil war broke out in Iraq, Bush told ABC News: "I don't buy your premise that there's going to be a civil war."

    He said he had spoken to leaders of all Iraqi sects and "I heard loud and clear that they understand that they're going to choose unification, and we're going to help them do so."

    Despite that, sectarian bloodshed has complicated efforts to forge a new unity government.

    At home, pessimism over Iraq, and Bush's support - despite bipartisan objections - for letting a state-owned Arab company take over operations at six U.S. ports, appeared to be major factors driving his job performance rating down to 34 percent.

    They were the lowest CBS News poll numbers of his presidency and create a grim picture in a midterm election year.

    The same poll showed public approval for Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq, once among his strongest suits, falling to 30 percent from 37 percent in January.

    Sixty-two percent of Americans said they thought U.S. efforts to bring order to Iraq were going badly, up from 54 percent in January, compared with 36 percent who said things were going well, a drop from 45 percent.

    US Troops Want Out

    Raising questions about Bush's vow to keep troops in Iraq as long as they are needed, a Le Moyne College/Zogby poll showed 72 percent of U.S troops serving there think the United States should exit within the next year. Nearly one in four said the troops should leave immediately.

    A strategy often used by the Bush administration against opponents of the war in Iraq has been to accuse them of being unfair to troops who want to stay until they get the job done.

    But Americans' opposition to the war has grown as U.S. casualties have mounted and violence has persisted despite a costly program to train Iraqi police and soldiers. There have been 2,295 U.S. military deaths in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003.

    Before leaving on a trip to India and Pakistan, Bush skirted a reporter's question of whether the latest Iraqi violence would affect prospects for beginning a drawdown of the 136,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq.

    "The people of Iraq and their leaders must make a choice," Bush said after a White House meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. "The choice is a free society, or a society dictated ... by evil people who will kill innocents."

    Administration officials have accused Sunni-led insurgents, including al Qaeda operatives, of trying to foment civil war in Iraq. In Washington, a U.S. military intelligence chief called the situation "very tenuous" but not yet civil war.

    Seated next to Bush, Berlusconi said he stood by his plan to withdraw all of Italy's 3,000 troops from Iraq by the end of the year.

    "This plan has been agreed upon also together with our allies, and with the Iraqi government," Berlusconi, one of Bush's staunchest allies on Iraq, told reporters.