January 14, 2007	Sunday	Zilhaj 23, 1427

WASHINGTON, Jan 13: The White House and the Pentagon are struggling to dispel fears that US President George W. Bush's warnings to Syria and Iran over Iraq and a US military build-up in the Gulf had set the stage for war.

“I want to address kind of a rumour, an urban legend that's going around,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said in a highly unusual prepared statement at his daily briefing on Friday as worry over US-Iran tensions ran high.

“This notion that somehow what the president was announcing was a precursor to planned military action -- a planned war against Iran, that's just not the case,” Snow told reporters.

Mr Bush vowed in a speech on Wednesday that US forces would “seek out and destroy” any networks funnelling weapons or fighters from Syria or Iran into Iraq, and said he had ordered another US aircraft carrier strike group to the region.

A senior US military official said on Thursday that the United States planned to keep two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Gulf for months -- the first such deployment since the first year of the Iraq war.

“The second carrier while there will not be just showing force, but will be actively involved in combat operations and providing air support. It will be a flexible, useful tool across the region,” the official said.

The Pentagon also announced that an air defence battalion equipped with Patriot missile defence systems will go to the region.

The idea was to reassure regional allies about regional ballistic missile threats -- and Iranian missiles posed the most prominent threat, the official said.

Mr Snow flatly denied that President Bush “was trying to prepare the way for war with either country and that there are war preparations under way. There are not.” At the same time, US officials defended a night-time raid by US forces on an Iranian office in the northern Iraq city of Arbil, saying six Iranians nabbed in the sweep had ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which Washington accuses of fomenting violence in Iraq.

Democratic Party Senator Joe Biden warned Rice on Thursday that sending US troops across Iran's border would trigger “a constitutional confrontation” between the opposition-held Congress and the White House.

“We will fight that out if the president moves -- I just want the record to show,” said Mr Biden, a candidate for his party's 2008 presidential nomination.

On Friday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Friday that Bush's speech “refers strictly to operations inside the territory inside Iraq -- not crossing the border.” ”From a military standpoint, (there is) no need to cross the Iranian border,” agreed General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the panel that Iranian have been captured twice in Iraq in operations over the past couple of weeks.—AFP