Rumsfeld flies into Iraq for Christmas visit

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on a surprise Christmas Eve visit to US troops in Iraq, said he remained confident of defeating the insurgency and stabilising Iraq, while noting that to some “it looks bleak”.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on a surprise Christmas Eve visit with the troops three days after the devastating attack on a US military dining hall here, told soldiers he remained confident of defeating the insurgency and stabilising Iraq, while noting that to some “it looks bleak”.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, this is achievable,” Rumsfeld, who flew here under tight security, told a couple of hundred 1st Brigade soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division at their commander’s headquarters.

He promised them that later in life they will look back and feel pride at having contributed to a mission of historic importance.

“When it looks bleak, when one worries about how it’s going to come out, when one reads and hears the naysayers and the doubters who say it can’t be done, and that we’re in a quagmire here,” one should recall that there have been such doubters throughout every conflict in the history of the world,” he said.

Rumsfeld landed in pre-dawn darkness and immediately headed for a combat surgical hospital where many of the bombing victims were treated after Tuesday’s lunchtime attack on a mess tent.

Rumsfeld’s trip came on the heels of several difficult weeks for the defence chief.

Several high-profile Republicans have publicly criticised Rumsfeld, prompting US President George Bush to defend him as a “good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes”.

Speaking for himself on Wednesday, Rumsfeld said he stays awake at night worrying about soldiers and their families and shares their grief over lost loved ones.

Rumsfeld has made several visits to troops in the region, most recently two weeks ago to a forward base in Kuwait.

There, a handful of soldiers openly challenged him about inadequate equipment and long deployments. Rumsfeld cut short their complaints by saying: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”

He faced another firestorm earlier this week because he was not personally signing condolence letters to the families of dead soldiers, as the president does.

Critics fault him for poor post-war planning and for a steadily growing list of problems, from failure to strangle the insurgency to prisoner abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo.