Former US army general blasts Rumsfeld over Iraq

A former US army general on Sunday called for US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign on grounds of incompetence in Iraq, hours after Ayad Allawi, the former US-backed Iraqi prime minister, declared the country to be in the thick of a civil war that could soon "reach the point of no return."

Three years after Iraq was invaded, statistics published yesterday show that the frequency of insurgent bombings and group killings is growing, but both Rumsfeld and US President George W. Bush have vowed to fight on.

"Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," the defense secretary wrote in a Washington Post commentary, as the administration tried to quell growing concern that the conflict was unravelling beyond Washington's control.

Bush made a brief appearance on the White House lawn to say he was "encouraged" by progress on forming a unity government in Iraq. But he had no other good news to mark three years of a war in which more than 2,300 Americans have died, and which has so far cost US$500 billion.

The US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said that the troop withdrawals he had forecast for this spring or summer might have to wait until the end of the year or even next year. And Paul Eaton, a former US army general in charge of training Iraqi forces until 2004, marked the anniversary with a furious attack on Rumsfeld, saying he was "not competent to lead our armed forces."

There were signs yesterday that the Bush administration was losing its ability to shape perception of the conflict, even among partisan Republicans.

According to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington, there were 75 attacks a day last month, compared with 54 on average a year earlier. The number of Iraqi civilians being killed in the conflict rose to 1,000 in last month, from 750 in February last year.

There are now 232,000 Iraqi security personnel, up 90,000 over the past 12 months, but their ability to control the chaotic situation is a matter of dispute. Oil production, the mainstay of the economy, is in decline.

Last July Casey predicted that if the political process went well there could be "fairly substantial reductions" in US troops in Iraq this spring or summer.

On Sunday, calling on the US to keep its nerve, Rumsfeld pointed to the swelling ranks of Iraqi government forces. But Eaton, a former major general, said the defense secretary had "shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically", and was "far more than anyone else, responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq." Rumsfeld had to step down, he said.