SALT LAKE CITY, Aug 29: Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease ‘a new type of fascism’.

In unusually explicit terms, Mr Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from ‘moral and intellectual confusion about what threatens the nation’s security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.

In remarks prepared for delivery to the American Legion’s national convention, Mr Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failed efforts to appease the Adolf Hitler regime in the 1930s.

I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism, he said.

Mr Rumsfeld spoke to an American Legion convention as part of a coordinated White House strategy, in advance of the fifth anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on US soil, aiming to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and growing calls to withdraw US troops.

Mr Rumsfeld recalled a string of recent terrorist strikes, from the Sept 11 attacks to bombings in Bali, London and Madrid, and said it should be obvious to anyone that terrorists must be confronted, not appeased.

But it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons, he said, adding that part of the problem is that the American news media have tended to emphasise the negative rather than the positive.

He said, for example, that more media attention was given to US soldiers’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib than to the fact that Sergeant Paul Ray Smith received the Medal of Honor.—AP