WASHINGTON — 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of President Bush's policies in Iraq and has broken with his party in the past to suggest that American troops be withdrawn.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.
