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BAGHDAD - US President George W Bush said he would not pull troops out of Iraq "before the mission is complete".
Bush, speaking in the Baltic republics before a Nato summit, deflected talk of "civil war" -- a description which could increase pressure on him to withdraw US forces.
"There is one thing I'm not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete," he said in a speech at the University of Latvia.
In Baghdad, US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said there had been a "dramatic spike" in killings and said violence would rise but still did not meet the military's definition of civil war.
Car bombs close to west Baghdad's main Yarmouk hospital killed four people and wounded 40 on Tuesday. Five young Iraqi girls were killed in Ramadi and in Kirkuk a suicide bomber attacked the governor's convoy.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told the visiting Iraqi president the US occupation and US-backed "agents" in the region were to blame for Iraq's violence.
Ferocious sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in February has eclipsed the Sunni insurgency as the main source of turmoil.
The New York Times and other US news outlets have now adopted the term "civil war" to describe the violence.
The White House acknowledged on Monday Iraq was in a "new phase" but denied it amounted to civil war.
Asked at a news conference in Estonia what the difference was between the bloodshed and civil war, Bush said recent bombings were part of a pattern of al Qaeda attacks aimed at provoking conflict between religious groups.
"The plan of Mr Zarqawi was to foment sectarian violence," he said, referring to the former leader of al Qaeda in Iraq killed by a US air strike in June, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"What you're seeing on TV started last February," he said. "It was an attempt by people to foment sectarian violence."
Caldwell said Iraq was not in a civil war because the government was functioning, it had the loyalty of its security forces and no group was trying to overthrow and replace it.
But he predicted "elevated levels of violence in the next couple of weeks ... al Qaeda, foreign terrorists and extremists do not want to let Iraqis decide their own future".
- REUTERS
