TALLINN, Estonia, 29 November 2006 — President Bush said yesterday an Al-Qaeda plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge in Iraq is to blame for escalating bloodshed, and refused to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war.
“No question it’s tough, no question about it,” Bush said at a news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. “There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by Al-Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal.”
Bush, who travels to Jordan later in the week for a high-stakes summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, said an uptick in violence does not represent a new era in Iraq. The country is reeling from the deadliest week of sectarian fighting since the war began in March 2003.
“We’ve been in this phase for a while,” Bush said.
The president dated the current spike to the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which triggered attacks and reprisal counterattacks between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority, and raised fears of civil war.
Bush said he will ask Al-Maliki to explain his plan for quelling the violence.
“The Maliki government is going to have to deal with that violence and we want to help them do so,” the president said. “It’s in our interest that we succeed.”
Directly seeking help from Iran and Syria with Iraq, as part of new, aggressive diplomacy throughout the region, is expected to be among the recommendations of a bipartisan panel on Iraq. Led by former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the group is expected to present recommendations to Bush next month.
But Bush repeated his administration’s reluctance to talk with two nations it regards as pariah states working to destabilize the Middle East.
Iran, the top US rival in the region, has reached out to Iraq and Syria in recent days — an attempt viewed as a bid to assert its role as a powerbroker in Iraq.
The president said Iraq is a sovereign nation, free to meet with its neighbors. “If that’s what they think they ought to do, that’s fine,” he said. “One thing Iraq would like to see is for the Iranians to leave them alone.”
Bush, under pressure to change direction in Iraq, also said yesterday he will not be persuaded by any calls to withdraw American troops before the country is stabilized.
“There’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he said in a speech setting the stage for high-stakes meetings with the Iraqi prime minister later this week. “We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.”
The recent Democratic victory in midterm US elections added fuel to the argument from Democrats that US soldiers should withdraw from Iraq. But Bush has resisted, even while acknowledging the need for a different approach.
“We’ll continue to be flexible and we’ll make the changes necessary to succeed,” he said.
