WASHINGTON, May 10 (IslamOnline.net) – Breaking one year of silence, senior U.S. military officials hit out at the Pentagon’s strategic and tactical blunders, calling for sacking their boss Donald Rumsfeld and his top aides, a mass-circulation U.S. daily reported on Sunday, May 9.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rev. and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said that Rumsfeld should stand international investigation, calling for an end to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Several of those generals and officers interviewed by the Washington Post, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, warned that a profound anger is building within the army at Rumsfeld and those around him, saying the U.S. "is already on the road to defeat" in Iraq.

Voicing their resentment publicly for the first time since the U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad on April 9, 2003, the officers said though the U.S. is winning militarily, it is failing to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and losing strategically, especially after the prisoner scandal, which exploded onto the world stage later last month. 

Asked whether the U.S. army is losing the war in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said, "I think strategically, we are".

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, agreed, noting a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. 

"Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he said.

He added that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was doomed to failure "because we don’t understand the war we’re in".

Larry Diamond, who until recently was a senior political adviser of the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, said the U.S. dreams in Iraq are "up in the air now". 

"That's what is at stake. . . . We can't keep making tactical and strategic mistakes." 

Rumsfeld To Blame 

Asked who was to blame, a senior general at the Pentagon said decisively Rumsfeld and Pentagon no. 2 Paul D. Wolfowitz. 

"The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice," the general told the paper. 

"It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this," he said. "The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not." 

A Special Forces officer also called for Rumsfeld’s resignation, saying, "Rumsfeld needs to go, as does Wolfowitz".

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a frequent Pentagon consultant, said, "The people in the military are mad as hell."

He said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, should be fired.

He and others are recommending a series of related revisions to the U.S. approach in the occupied country.

Defense consultant Michael Vickers, for instance, advocates trimming the U.S. presence in Iraq, making it much more like the one in Afghanistan, where there are 20,000 troops and almost none in the capital, Kabul.

Rumsfeld faced mounting pressure from U.S. Senators, Representatives and the press to step down, after the Iraqi prisoner scandal, though he offered his "deepest apology" and took responsibility for the misconduct of his soldiers.

Apologies by President George W. Bush and other top officials have so far failed to water international outrage over the graphic photos of tortured and sexually abused prisoners. 

The Washington Post splashed Thursday, May 6, more abhorrent photos, saying it had obtained 1,000 digital pictures.

One of the photos showed a soldier holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked Iraqi detainee grimacing and lying on the floor. 

Pentagon Armchairs 

Commanders on the ground in Iraq ridiculed the optimistic clichés of Pentagon armchairs, who continue to put on a happy face publicly.

But privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, said one Pentagon consultant. 

"It's 'Dead Man Walking,'" he said. 

Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, commander of a 1st Infantry Division brigade based in Baquba, north of Baghdad, said the view from Washington is much worse than it appears on the ground. 

The paper cited an article written in the New York Review of Books in mid-April by former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith under the title "How to Get out of Iraq".   

It said the article was carried online and began circulating among some the U.S. military. 

Shoring Up Rumsfeld 

But the U.S. administration has sought to defend Rumsfeld. Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Rumsfeld retains the president's "strongest possible support". 

"The president strongly supports Donald Rumsfeld and so do his colleagues, and I strongly support him," Rice told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday.

"He's doing a good job as secretary of defense in one of the most challenging periods in American history." 

Vice President Richard Cheney told the paper through a spokesman that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had. People ought to let him do his job."

Rice said "what the president expects, and what the secretary's doing, is getting to the bottom of what's happened. This is an awful situation."