President Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, has lent his voice to a growing chorus of former military leaders and prominent neoconservatives questioning the decisions of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in Iraq.

Against a backdrop of rumors of a pending resignation, more deadly terror attacks in Iraq, and sinking popularity for the war, Mr. Powell over the weekend said bluntly that missteps were made during the war that led to the current level of the insurgency.

Speaking Saturday to the annual conference of the National School Board Association, Mr. Powell said,”We made some serious mistakes in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported. “We didn’t have enough troops on the ground. We didn’t impose our will. And as a result, an insurgency got started, and … it got out of control.”

While those remarks are hardly out of step today with mainstream opinion in Washington, the timing and source of the remarks is particularly damaging to the White House in an election year. Mr. Powell is the architect of America’s failed efforts to get the U.N. Security Council to endorse a resolution for the 2003 invasion and, after retiring in 2005, he expressed anger that the intelligence he presented there turned out to be largely incorrect.

Nonetheless, Mr. Powell has kept his powder relatively dry. While his former chief of staff has given numerous interviews and speeches alleging a “cabal” comprised of Vice President Cheney and secretary of defense, hijacked American foreign policy in the first Bush term, Mr. Powell has been largely shy of speaking out in public.

But Mr. Powell, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,may now be opening up, just as some of his old colleagues are also voicing their concerns about the war. On April 2, Mr. Powell’s close confidant and the former general in charge of central command, Anthony Zinni, called on Mr. Rumsfeld to resign because of a “series of disastrous mistakes.”

This week’s issue of Time Magazine runs a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s handling of the war and Mr. Rumsfeld by former Lt. General Greg Newbold, who resigned from the military in 2002 in protest at the Iraq war.

He writes, “The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it.”

On March 19, a third retired general, Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training Iraqi troops, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times also calling on Mr. Rumsfeld to step aside.

In many ways the former generals are catching up with the people they blame for the Iraq war in the first place. The neoconservative Weekly Standard first called on Mr. Rumsfeld to resign his post in 2005 and has been one of the most dogged critics of his decision to run the occupation of Iraq with too few troops in their estimation.

A Defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Donnelly yesterday said the defense secretary is not likely to be leaving his post.”I think Rumsfeld has a constituency of one, but that one happens to be the president,” he said. “I don’t sense at all that the White House is feeling any pressure to make a change.”

As for Mr. Powell’s remarks over the weekend, Mr. Donnelly noted that at the time the secretary of state appeared pleased with the outcome of the war. “I think Powell was pretty happy with the war plan and certainly with the reaction after the war,” he said.

“There may be some sense of score settling or something like that. On the other hand, even if you were part of the neocon cabal, there is a huge reason to be unhappy with the way military operations have been conducted. The real heart of the neocon cabal, guys like Bill Kristol, are the most unhappy.”

A former special adviser to the Pentagon before the war and the coalition provisional authority during the occupation, Michael Rubin, yesterday said Mr. Powell was right to note mistakes, but he identified the wrong ones.

“The immediate mistake was not having an immediate transfer of sovereignty. And the other mistake was trying to sideline Iraqi politicians, which as it turns out were the right ones all along. All the oppositionists he mocked as exiles are the ones winning the elections,” he said.

“The problem is we won the military campaign,” Mr. Rubin added. “We did better than anyone expected, and we lost the occupation. The biggest mistake was that we agreed to be an occupying power. In one fell swoop, in order to get an ephemeral endorsement from the United Nations we justified everything the insurgents said about us.”