Al Qaeda tries to foment Iraq civil war-US general
Source: Reuters
(Writes through with more quotes) By Andrew Gray WASHINGTON, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Iraq has not descended into a civil war but al Qaeda is trying to provoke one and the United States should focus on thwarting those efforts, the top U.S. general said on Wednesday. Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States should not be diverted by debates over whether the sectarian violence gripping Baghdad and other parts of Iraq was a civil war. He also dismissed a report the United States was considering pulling its forces out of the restive Anbar province and moving them to Baghdad. Defense officials said a much smaller shift was under way inside Iraq, however, to bring new troops into the capital. "The level of violence that is being inflicted by al Qaeda and the like is specifically designed to create a civil war," Pace told reporters at the Pentagon. "It is specifically designed to create an ungovernable condition so the terrorists then can set up shop and rule those people the way they want to," he added. "It's much more important that we focus on how to defeat the enemy that is trying to create the civil war than it is we spend a lot of time dancing on the head of a pin as far as what particular words we should use," Pace said. Pace spoke as U.S. President George W. Bush, under heavy pressure for a change of course in Iraq, arrived for crisis talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan. Their meeting set for Wednesday was delayed until Thursday. Pace said he believed Iraq was not in a civil war as its government was still functioning and its security forces were still responding to its orders. The Iraqi government itself did not see the conflict as a civil war, he noted. The United Nations said last week more than 3,700 civilians had been killed by the violence in Iraq in October alone and 100,000 people were fleeing abroad every month. POWELL JOINS DEBATE The debate over whether Iraq is in civil war, three years after U.S.-led forces invaded, has heated up in recent days after the NBC television network said on Monday it would use the term to describe the conflict. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became on Wednesday the latest prominent figure to label the fighting a civil war. "I have been using it (the term) because I like to face the reality," Powell, a key figure in making the case for the 2003 invasion, told a business forum in the United Arab Emirates. Commenting on an ABC television report the United States could pull out of Anbar, Pace said it would be unwise to abandon the area, a hotbed of al Qaeda fighters and Sunni insurgents. "Why would we want to forfeit any part of Iraq to the enemy? We don't," he said. Pentagon officials said two battalions -- about 1,600 troops -- would move into Baghdad from the northern city of Mosul. The troops come from the 3rd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division, the officials said. The move was intended to fill a gap left by the recent departure of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, an Alaska-based unit whose mission in Iraq was extended earlier this year in another effort to bolster Baghdad security. The United States has nearly 140,000 troops in Iraq. More than 2,880 U.S. troops and at least tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion.
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