It's snowing on Rumsfeld's parade

One of Rummy's famous snowflakes has started a blizard.

The leak of a dour, two-page memo addressed to four of Rumsfeld's top aides and filled with a series of fundamental questions that most experts would have expected to have been thought out long ago is the latest indication of serious disarray - even self-doubt - among the Bush administration hawks who led the march to war in Iraq.

Coming two weeks into a major administration public relations campaign to persuade the public that things in Iraq are going much better than the press is reporting and on the eve of a donors' conference in Madrid designed to persuade US allies to cough up billions of dollars in reconstruction aid for Iraq, the timing for airing Rumsfeld's worries could not be much worse.

The US commander in Iraq disclosed on Wednesday that attacks on US troops there have increased sharply in October, reaching a high of 35 a day, compared to between 10 and 15 attacks in July and August.

But analysts in the US said the growing attacks also indicate that the resistance continues to grow and spread to regions that have been relatively quiet.

Perhaps most strikingly, he indicates that the Pentagon has never devised specific benchmarks for assessing progress in its anti-terrorism campaign. "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he adds. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" he asks, exclaiming later, "the cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions ... is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get'?"

On the record, administration officials described the memo as a reflection of just the kind of critical process that is needed to prevail in a long, drawn-out war. Off the record, they admitted that the questions were not exactly ones that inspired confidence.