Bleak Pentagon study admits 'civil war' in Iraq

As Congress moved towards a vote on withdrawing US forces next year, the Pentagon issued its latest and bleakest assessment of conditions in Iraq, for the first time acknowledging the country had, in effect, plunged into "civil war".

The report focuses on the final three months of 2006, immediately before President George Bush's "surge" in US troops that appears to have led to some decline in daily violence in Baghdad.

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But despite some "promising" early signs, it was too soon to determine if the policy was working, it said.

And even if the new US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, will have more than 25,000 extra troops at his disposal, serious problems remain with their Iraqi counterparts. As of February, barely half of the 329,000 supposedly trained Iraqi soldiers and police officers actually show up for duty.

In the meantime, the report continues, "some elements of the situation... are properly descriptive of a 'civil war,' complete with the hardening of sectarian identities, population displacements, and armed groups engaged in "a self-sustaining cycle of politically motivated violence".

That may have an important bearing because the House and Senate are debating legislation requiring US combat troops to pull out of Iraq during 2008, heightening tensions between the White House and the Democratic majority.