WASHINGTON — Two top U.S. military commanders provided Congress with their bleakest assessment yet of sectarian conflict in Iraq, acknowledging Thursday that security in the country had deteriorated markedly in the last six months.
In their first formal appraisal since March, the generals said U.S. forces needed to help stem the cycle of attacks and reprisals between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in Baghdad, a task they said would prevent a significant reduction in the number of American troops this year.
"Sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular," said Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East. "If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq would move toward civil war."
U.S. officials have avoided characterizing the widespread violence as a civil war, which Abizaid has said would be the military's worst-case scenario. But some Iraqis and others already consider the situation to be tantamount to an undeclared civil war between Shiite and Sunni Arab groups in which thousands have been killed, many execution-style, this year.
Abizaid and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that they did not think an all-out civil war was likely. But their discussion of the possibility indicated the extent of the decline they had seen. In an appearance before the same Senate panel in March, Abizaid was far more confident that such strife could be avoided.
"I think that Iraq remains a long way from civil war," he said at the time. "While we see very, very high tensions, it's still not to the point where we see it moving toward civil war."
Both military commanders told senators Thursday that the situation was worse than they thought it could become a year ago.
The generals' blunt assessment comes as President Bush struggles with a growing list of foreign policy challenges -- in Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Lebanon, among other places -- while working to keep his problems from tarnishing Republican prospects in November's congressional elections.
Until Thursday, U.S. commanders had held out the possibility of troop reductions in Iraq before the end of the year.
Some in the military point to the February bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra as the turning point at which sectarian warfare escalated.
