Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has compared the current situation to the aftermath of the Second World War. In an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, Rumsfeld wrote: "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."

Meanwhile, a former US military general has called on Rumsfeld to resign. Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, former Major General Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training Iraqi troops after the US invasion, wrote: “[Rumsfeld] has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq.”