DONALD RUMSFELD twice offered to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, but President Bush twice turned him down, the US Defence Secretary revealed last night.

Mr Rumsfeld said that as calls for his head swirled around Washington and much of the world last spring, he thought that the best interests of the Administration might be served by his departure.

“I submitted my resignation to President Bush twice during that period and told him that I felt that he ought to make the decision as to whether or not I stay on,” he told CNN’s Larry King. “He made that decision and said he did want me to stay on.”

Mr Rumsfeld said that he would have had had no regrets if Mr Bush had accepted his resignation. “You know, what was going on in the midnight shift in Abu Ghraib prison halfway across the world is something that clearly someone in Washington DC can’t manage or deal with.”

Mr Rumsfeld, who used to refer to Iraqi guerrillas as “a few dead-enders”, also admitted that he had been surprised by the insurgency. “It has clearly been at a level that has been more intense than had been anticipated.”

Mr Rumsfeld blamed the strength of the insurgency in part on Washington’s failure to win Turkish agreement to send the US Army’s Fourth Infantry Division overland into northern Iraq at the start of the Iraq war as planned.

“Because of that, the Sunnis north of Baghdad never really got engaged in the war and an insufficient number were captured and killed in that part of the country. And they didn’t ever really experience the full power of the United States military. And they, in many instances, today are the ones that are fomenting this insurgency that exists in Iraq,” he said.

Mr Rumsfeld’s surprise disclosure that he was twice ready to quit came just as fresh question marks were being raised over his future. After his re-election last November, Mr Bush had signalled that his often cantankerous Defence Secretary would remain in post. However, Mr Bush’s decision appeared to have as much to do with an unwillingness to change the whole of his national security team at the same time as it was a vote of confidence in Mr Rumsfeld.

The Defence Secretary suggested in last night’s interview that he was not ready to leave the Pentagon. Asked whether he was going to serve the full four years, he said that he had not discussed it with Mr Bush. “My wife, Joyce, however, said, ‘You’re going to know when to quit. And that’s when you start trimming.’ And I havent started trimming yet, Larry.”

Last May, as Congress started to examine what had led to Abu Ghraib and the biggest American public relations catastrophe since Vietnam, a contrite Mr Rumsfeld shouldered his share of the blame.

“These events occurred on my watch. As Secretary of Defence, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility,” said Mr Rumsfeld, shorn of his usual feisty and combative demeanour.

He offered his “deepest apologies” and compensation to detainees abused by US troops. “I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees. They are human beings.”

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