U.S. tries to calm worries of rising Iraqi strife

WASHINGTON — With sectarian violence exploding across Iraq, Bush administration officials grappled for ways Thursday to calm the fury and play down warnings that Iraq could be sliding into a broader civil war, even as some U.S. military officers privately acknowledged they were worried by the attacks.

U.S. officials insisted that the eruption would not throw off the country's progress and unveiled no new plans for U.S. action to counter the sudden deterioration of the country's political and security outlook.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, en route to an unscheduled visit to Beirut, Lebanon, rejected a question on whether the country was descending into civil war.

"I don't think we do the Iraqi people any good, or really that we are fair to them, in continually raising the specter that they might fall into civil war, when it seems that the only people who want a civil war in Iraq are the terrorists ... ," Rice said.

U.S. envoy's actions

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was trying to reach out to Iraqi political leaders to calm the situation, Rice said.

In Washington, D.C., Adam Ereli, the deputy State Department spokesman, said Iraq continued to move forward politically, despite a day in which developments seemed to endanger the U.S. goal of an ethnically and religiously unified government in Baghdad.

About the violence, Ereli said: "Let's not blow this out of proportion."

He insisted that "there has not been the kind of widespread unrest that many people feared" and praised the "vigorous response" of the Iraqi security forces. Instead of a potential government collapse, Ereli called the response to the aftermath of the shrine's destruction "an affirmation that the approach we've been taking has worked."

Ereli also minimized the potential significance of a Sunni pullout from talks to form a new government, saying the process was complicated.

"It's not a straight line with the same amount of movement every single day," he said. "It is a path with twists and turns. One should not conclude that because there is a pause one day, that the whole political process is collapsing."

But officials here held out hope that the interruption will be brief. They noted that the Sunnis have suspended cooperation several times before. "So there's a pattern of them venting and coming back," one official said.

Some Iraqis complained that the U.S. forces had not done enough to prevent violence.

No U.S. buildup

The U.S. military, which has lowered force levels in Iraq by more than 20,000 troops since December's elections to about 133,000, reported no moves toward a possible new buildup. Instead, several U.S. military officers said, the plan is to rely on Iraq's fledgling security forces to take the lead in attempting to contain the strife.

Nonetheless, U.S. officials anticipate that tensions will remain high in Iraq for at least the next few days. One critical indicator, several officials said, will be the messages delivered by imams at Friday prayer services.

In the event conditions spiral out of control, U.S. military officers said, forces in Iraq could be quickly enlarged by a U.S. army brigade of about 3,500 troops on standby in Kuwait and by the deployment of other strategic reserve elements from the United States.