Rumsfeld Singled Out as Crisis Deepens in Iraq

Rumsfeld Singled Out as Crisis Deepens in Iraq

By Julian Borger and Jonathan Steele
The Guardian UK

Monday 20 March 2006

Defence chief attacked on war's third anniversary. Ex-PM Allawi says conflict is tantamount to civil war.

A former US army general yesterday called for 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 Mr Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and George 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 defence secretary wrote in a Washington Post commentary, as the administration tried to quell growing concern that the conflict was unravelling beyond Washington's control.

President 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 $500bn (nearly £290bn).

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 2007. And Paul Eaton, a former American army general in charge of training Iraqi forces until 2004, marked the anniversary with a furious attack on Mr Rumsfeld, saying he was "not competent to lead our armed forces".

In London, Mr Allawi told BBC 2's Sunday AM programme: "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Britain's defence secretary, John Reid, rejected that assessment. In Baghdad's green zone, he said that most of Iraq was under control: "There is not civil war now, nor is it inevitable, nor is it imminent".

In Washington, the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, also appeared on television to play down ideas of civil war. He told the CBS programme Face the Nation that the surge in attacks aimed at fomenting sectarian conflict simply reflected the insurgents' "state of desperation".

The remark echoed a similarly optimistic phrase used by Mr Cheney in March last year, when he claimed the insurgency was in its "last throes". Yesterday, he maintained that that description was still "basically accurate".

There were signs yesterday that the Bush administration was losing its ability to shape perception of the conflict, even among partisan Republicans. George Will, an influential conservative commentator, yesterday compared Iraq's war to that of the 1930s Spanish civil war.

Mr Allawi now heads a list of secular parties that had hoped to broker a compromise between the Shia and Sunni parties. He warned that if Iraq reached the point of no return it would "not only fall apart, but sectarianism would spread through the region". He said even Europe and the US would "not be spared all the violence" linked to sectarian problems.

There were no public gatherings in Baghdad yesterday. People continued to race to work and back home, fearing explosions, kidnapping or murder.

Iraqi police reported that US troops had killed eight people, after a patrol was ambushed in the Sunni town of Duluiya, north of Baghdad, early yesterday. The victims included a 13-year-old boy and his parents, who were shot dead.

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 February, from 750 in February 2005. There are now 232,000 Iraqi security personnel, up 90,000 over the past 12 months, but their ability to control the situation is a matter of dispute. Oil production, the mainstay of the economy, is in decline.

The Islamist parties have failed to agree on a national unity government and sectarian violence has markedly increased.

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

Yesterday, calling on the US to keep its nerve, Mr Rumsfeld pointed to the swelling ranks of Iraqi government forces. But Mr Eaton, a former major general, said the defence 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". Mr Rumsfeld had to step down, he said.

Backstory

Since the invasion of Iraq three years ago, the US military has lost more than 2,300 troops in combat, roadside explosions, insurgent attacks and friendly fire. But that figure is dwarfed by estimates for the number of Iraqis killed, which range from a conservative 30,000 to a more speculative 100,000. As many as 50 people are killed every day. Britain has lost 103 soldiers in Iraq, while other nations together have lost 94 troops. But the cost of war has not just been measured in human terms. There is the financial cost. The US is still spending $6bn (£3.5bn) a month in Iraq, primarily on the 130,000 troops it still maintains in the country.