WASHINGTON, Oct 23: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached for the Oxford dictionary on Thursday to try to take the sting out of a leaked memo that warned the United States faces a “long, hard slog” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Rumsfeld burst into a regular Pentagon briefing by surprise, armed with what he said was the dictionary’s preferred definition of the word “slog”.

“Slog: to hit or strike hard, to drive with blows, to assail violently,” Mr Rumsfeld said.

“And that’s precisely what the US has been doing and intends to continue to do,” he added.

Asked whether that was the definition he intended when he wrote the memo, Mr Rumsfeld grinned: “It’s close enough for government work.”

The performance was classic Rumsfeld, pouncing on a word’s definition to try to deflect the impact of a memo whose disclosure had embarrassed the administration.

The memo, which dominated the news here, questioned whether the Defence Department is changing quickly enough to win the war on terrorism, and raised other pointed questions about the progress being made.

Its tone contrasted sharply with the administration’s campaign to highlight progress in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Rumsfeld said he wrote the memo quickly after meeting with his combatant commanders to get down questions that the discussions had provoked in him.

“I reread the memo in the paper and thought, ‘Not bad,’” Mr Rumsfeld said. He said he had not ordered an investigation into who leaked the memo.—AFP