TOKYO, Nov 9: Japan's defense chief said on Thursday he had worried about his ousted US counterpart Donald Rumsfeld's hawkish views and believed he could have done more to end the raging violence in Iraq.

“I was a bit worried that he was too bullish on the conditions in Iraq,”Defense Agency Director General Fumio Kyuma told reporters.

“Anti-US sentiment has heightened greatly in Iraq,” he said. “Considering that, I wonder if he could have taken some measures to abate it.”Kyuma said he did not expect major changes in US policy after the mid-term elections, in which Democrats routed US President George W. Bush's Republican Party on a wave of opposition to the Iraq war.

Rumsfeld, a main architect of the war and a hate figure for Democrats, had also championed a global restructuring of the US military to adapt to 21st-century threats.

The plan includes the biggest shift in decades in US troops in Japan, including the pullout of an estimated 8,000 Marines from the southern island chain of Okinawa and the relocation of a key air base there by 2014.

Japan's top government spokesman, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said Rumsfeld's resignation would not change the plan, which was agreed in negotiations with him.—AFP