US: US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld is to be pitched into the centre of the American midterm election fight by Democrats who are convinced that he is the Bush administration's Achilles' heel.
Senior Democratic members of Congress say they will seek a no-confidence vote in Mr Rumsfeld, who is under fire for a speech this week in which he compared opponents of the Iraq war to those who supported the appeasement of Adolf Hitler before the second World War.
Rahm Emanuel, a high-profile member of the House of Representatives, plans to introduce the motion in the presence of 12 retired generals and other officers who have lent the weight of their military experience to the campaign to force the defence secretary's resignation. Democratic senators are discussing a similar move. Such a vote could not compel Mr Rumsfeld to quit, but it would be highly embarrassing to the governing party.
The Democrats are mounting an attempt to seize control of Congress in November's midterm elections by engaging the Republicans on their turf - national security and defence issues. The strategy comes in response to a new effort by George Bush and Mr Rumsfeld to defend the administration's foreign policy record. In a string of speeches this week the president sought to bundle Iraq and Afghanistan with crises over Iran and Lebanon, describing current events as "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century".
It was as part of this initiative that Mr Rumsfeld told a meeting of war veterans on Tuesday that the world faced "a new type of fascism" from those who opposed the administration's policies and had "still not learned history's lessons". In yesterday's LA Times, he continued with an attack on Amnesty International for having called Guantánamo Bay "the gulag of our times" even though it "includes a volleyball court, basketball court, soccer field and library".
Nancy Pelosi, the Senate minority leader, seized on the remarks. "If Mr Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War Two, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe," she said.
The Republicans' most influential campaign consultant, Frank Luntz, said Mr Rumsfeld had become a "weak link in an otherwise relatively strong Republican issue. The Democrats can't win in the war on terror, but they do hold an advantage on Iraq."
In a new report the Pentagon said yesterday that conditions which could lead to a civil war exist in Iraq, and that the "core conflict" has changed into one pitting Sunni Muslims against Shias, with the Sunni Arab insurgency overshadowed. It said Iraqi deaths rose 51 per cent on the previous quarter. - (Guardian service)