WASHINGTON, Nov 1: Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted his staff to “keep elevating the threat” of terrorism to make the American people rally behind the Bush administration in the Iraq war.

In a series of internal memos to his staff, written between 2002 and 2006 and published in various US newspapers on Thursday, Mr Rumsfeld appears desperate to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.

“Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realise they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” Mr Rumsfeld urges his staff in a memo written in April 2006. People will “rally” to sacrifice. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice — Victory,” he writes. “Link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war, he argues. “Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran.”

Such efforts, however, did not make the Iraq war popular.

On Nov 8, 2006, Mr Rumsfeld stepped down after a humiliating defeat for the ruling Republican Party in the mid-term congressional election. His critics blamed his unpopular Iraq policies for the defeat.

In one memo, Mr Rumsfeld also blames oil rich Muslim nations for his troubles. He laments that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims “from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labour, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed,” he writes. “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.” If radicals “get a hold of” oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he adds, the United States will have “an enormous national security problem.”

The Washington Post, which was the first newspaper to obtain these memos, notes that the missives show how much Mr Rumsfeld was affected by criticism and how he worked to get the American public to support the Iraq war.

Mr Rumsfeld apparently wrote 20-60 of these memos a day. In an April 2006 memo, Mr Rumsfeld chides his aides for not doing enough to fight back his critics.

“Go out and push people back, rather than simply defending” the Iraq policy and strategy, he writes in a memo to his staff in April 2006. “I am always on the defence. They say I do it well, but you can’t win on the defence,” he writes. “We can’t just keep taking hits.”

In an earlier memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Mr Rumsfeld argues that the challenges there are “not unusual.” Pessimistic news reports -- “our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost” -- simply result from the wrong standards being applied.

In one of his longer messages, in May 2004, Mr Rumsfeld considers whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a “worldwide insurgency.” The goal of the enemy, he writes, is to “end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world.” He then advises aides “to test what the results could be” if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Mr Rumsfeld complains in the same memo.

The messages to his staff also delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism.

In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Mr Rumsfeld warns that the United States is “getting run out of Central Asia” by the Russians, who are doing a “considerably better job at bullying” than Washington is doing to “counter their bullying.”