George W. Bush on Tuesday dismissed the rapidly hardening consensus that Iraq is in a state of civil war in spite of the adoption of the term by analysts, media organisations and prominent politicians from both main US parties.

Mr Bush, who will on Thursday meet Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, inJordan, said that the sectarian violence in Iraq had been fomented by the al-Qaeda terrorist group as a deliberate strategy to force the Americans out of Iraq. Last week a suspected Sunni group set off bombs that killed 200 Iraqi Shia in Baghdad in the worst phase of sectarian killings since an attack in February on the Shia holy shrine of Samarra.

"There is no question it is tough," the president told reporters in Estonia, before travelling to Latvia for a Nato summit. "There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented because of these attacks by al-Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal. We will work with the Maliki government to defeat these elements."

Mr Bush said he would ask Mr Maliki to set out a strategy for dealing with the sectarian violence, which he said had been continuing "in this phase for a while".

He rejected the suggestion the US should hold direct talks with Iran and Syria in order to help stabilise the situation in Iraq. "Iran knows how to get to the table with us," he said. "That is to verifiably suspend their [uranium] enrichment programmes."

The president's comments are likely to fuel growing concern in Washington that he is much less flexible on his strategy in Iraq than many had hoped after the Republican defeat in mid-term congressional elections earlier this month.

They are also likely to renew focus on the workings of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group led by James Baker, former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, which is set to produce its recommendations in the next two or three weeks.

Leaks from the 10-member commission and direct comments by Mr Baker indicate its findings are likely to be sharply at odds with Mr Bush's insistence that the US can still achieve "victory" in spite of the spiralling level of killings and the failure to "stand up" Iraqi security forces on anything like the scale Washington had targeted. The report is expected to include an option for the "phased redeployment" of the 145,000-strong US forces in Iraq and direct talks with Iraq's neighbours to stabilise the country.

Mr Bush also faces widespread scepticism about the degree to which Mr Maliki can respond to his call for a new strategy to quell the militia killings in Iraq.

"To put it bluntly, the US government must stop lying about the true nature of Iraqi readiness and the Iraqi force development," said Anthony Cordesman, a widely respected commen-tator on Iraq at the Centre for Strategic International Studies. "The US can only do more harm to Iraqi force development if it continues to exaggerate Iraqi capability, attempts to expand Iraqi forces even more quickly, and transfers responsibility before Iraqi forces can dothe job."

On Tuesday, NBC news became the latest and most prominent US media organisation to label the situation in Iraq a "civil war". Some analysts compared the network's announcement toa broadcast delivered by Walter Cronkite of CBS in 1968, in which he called the Vietnam war a failure and sought an honourable withdrawal. The broadcast proved devastating for President Lyndon B. Johnson.