Rumsfeld must go, says US Army newspaper

In a fresh blow to the Republican Party's rapidly diminishing midterm election hopes, an influential US Army newspaper group is today calling on the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to resign for the "failure" of his military strategy.

The blunt message, published in the Military Times newspapers, which include the widely read Army Times, accuses Mr Rumsfeld of losing touch with military leadership and the American public.

The editorial, "Time for Rumsfeld to Go",says: "Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised." It concludes: "The time has come, Mr President, to face the hard bruising truth; Donald Rumsfeld must go."

The call could not come at a worse time for President George Bush or the Republicans. Tomorrow's elections are widely tipped to be a disaster for the party, with some predicting a Democrat recapture of both houses of Congress. The New York Times offered a fresh blow to the party yesterday saying that for the first time it was endorsing no Republican congressional candidates this year. In its editorial, the Times criticised the Republican-led Congress on matters from tax cuts to energy policy, and charged it has failed to hold Mr Bush accountable for the Iraq war.

The conflict in Iraq, where there has been a sharp increase in violence in recent months and the death toll of US soldiers is spiralling upwards, has become a political liability for Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld.

Mr Bush commended his Defence Secretary last week for doing "a good job", but several conservatives who supported the invasion are publicly criticising the administration's handling of the conflict. Richard Perle, a former defence adviser to Mr Bush, told Vanity Fair magazine that incompetence had turned Iraq policy into a "disaster".

Kenneth Adelman, another neo-con who served on the Defence Policy Board, predicted that the invasion would be a "cakewalk". But he now judges Mr Bush's national security team to be incompetent. "Not only did each of them individually have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional," he said.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, has dismissed the Military Times editorial as a "shabby piece of work". And Bryan Whitman, the spokesman for the Pentagon, said criticism from military leaders cited in the editorial was "actually old news".