The Specter of Iraq Civil War Riles Senator

On the heels of new warnings from top U.S. generals about the possibility of civil war in Iraq, a senior Republican lawmaker on Sunday publicly questioned the wisdom of moving more American troops into Baghdad to stop the violence.

“Are we going to put our troops in the middle of a civil war?” Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“This will be a slaughter of immense proportions,” he said. “The American people will not put up with it. The leadership in Congress will not put up with it.”

His warnings came on a day in which three American troops were killed in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad. The U.S. military offered no further details on the deaths, which occurred Sunday night.

Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, has been a frequent critic of President Bush’s policies in Iraq and has broken with his party in the past to suggest that American troops be withdrawn.

But his statements Sunday amplified questions expressed by two veteran GOP senators just three days earlier, when Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular.”

At the hearing Thursday, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who in the past has pressed for more troops in Iraq, said he worried that moving additional troops to the Iraqi capital would jeopardize security in other parts of the country. McCain is also a Vietnam War veteran.

And Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman and a loyal ally of the Bush administration, mused publicly about whether Congress would have to reexamine its authorization for the use of force in Iraq if American troops are called upon to stand in the middle of a civil war.

Warner has said that he supports the redeployment of about 3,700 American troops to Baghdad, which was ordered when an initiative by the new Iraqi government to improve security in the capital failed to quell sectarian violence.

U.S. commanders said they hoped the stepped-up American presence would slow the mounting sectarian violence.

On Sunday, Hagel said repeatedly that approach was “wrong,” suggesting instead that former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton be enlisted to help convene a regional conference to develop a strategy for peace.

“Unless you come at it that way, we’re going to be leaving Iraq. And it’s not going to be the way we intended to leave Iraq, because that -- that is the direction where this is going,” Hagel said.

Bush administration officials said Sunday that the situation in Iraq had not yet devolved into full civil war.

“The important point here is that Iraqis haven’t made the choice for civil war. Iraqis have made a choice for a unified government that can deliver for all Iraqis,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Yes, there are violent people who want to use sectarianism and sectarian violence to stoke a sense of insecurity. They are going right at Baghdad ... [but] there are large parts of the country that are stable and functioning,” Rice said.

The violence continued to flare across Iraq on Sunday, claiming the lives of 21 people, according to Iraqi authorities.

A suicide bomber killed 10 people attending a funeral in Tikrit, north of the capital. Among the victims were local politicians, police said.

In the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed two people. Three bodies in Iraqi uniforms and shot in the head were found northeast of the Sunni stronghold of Fallouja. Four more Iraqi soldiers were killed near Kirkuk when militants fired on a checkpoint.

In a separate incident near Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, two truck drivers transporting barbed wire and food to an American base were ambushed and killed. Their bodies were burned with their vehicles.

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Times staff writers Louise Roug and Jeffrey Fleishman in Baghdad and special correspondents in Kirkuk; Fallouja; and Samarra, Iraq, contributed to this report.