U.S. Officials Downplay Violence, Praise Iraqi Response

With sectarian violence exploding across Iraq, Bush administration officials grappled Thursday for ways to calm the fury and play down the bloodshed as they confronted a mounting crisis.

President Bush denounced the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra as an “evil act” intended to create civil strife and praised the Iraqi leaders who have been urging calm.

Bush said Americans strongly condemned Wednesday’s attack on the Golden Mosque and that he understood “the consternation and concern of Iraqi Shias when they see this most holy site wantonly destroyed.”

He said the United States would continue to work “with those voices of reason to enable Iraq to continue on the path to democracy” and pledged that the U.S. would help rebuild the shrine.

The second day of deadly violence brought wide warnings that Iraq could be sliding into an all-out civil war, and some U.S. military officers privately acknowledged that they were worried by the attacks. But in public statements, U.S. officials insisted that the eruption would not throw off Iraq’s progress, and they unveiled no new plans for American action to counter the sudden jolt to the country’s political and security outlook.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, en route to an unscheduled visit to Beirut, bluntly responded to 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 like [militant leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi,” Rice said.

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

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

Ereli called the Iraqi government’s response to the shrine’s destruction and the ensuing violence “an affirmation that the approach we’ve been taking has worked.”

He also minimized the potential significance of a Sunni Arab 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.”

Some Iraqis complained that U.S. forces had not done enough to prevent violence. But U.S. officials contended that American troops were not needed in the lead role, and that putting them in that position would undermine the Iraqi government.

“We’re seeing a confident, capable Iraqi government using their capable Iraqi security forces to calm the storm,” Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters in Baghdad.