WASHINGTON – The retired commander of key forces in Iraq called yesterday for Donald Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders who have criticized harshly the secretary of defense’s authoritarian style for making the military’s job more difficult.

“I think we need a fresh start” at the top of the Pentagon, retired Army Major General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-05, said in an interview. “We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork.”

General Batiste noted that many of his peers feel the same way. “It speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense,” he said in another interview earlier yesterday on CNN. General Batiste’s comments resonate especially within the Army because it is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No.2American military officer there, but declined because he no longer wished to serve under Mr. Rumsfeld. Also, before going to Iraq, he worked at the highest level of the Pentagon, serving as the senior military assistant to Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense.

General Batiste said that he believes the administration’s handling of the Iraq war has violated fundamental military principles, such as unity of command and unity of effort.

His comments follow similar recent high-profile attacks on Mr. Rumsfeld by three other retired flag officers, amid indications that many of their peers feel the same way.

“We won’t get fooled again,” retired Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, who held the key post of director of operations on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2000 to 2002, wrote in an essay in Time magazine this week. Listing a series of mistakes such as “McNamara-like micromanagement,” a reference to the Vietnam Warera secretary of defense, General Newbold called for “replacing Mr. Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach.”

Last month, another top officer who served in Iraq, retired Army Major General Paul Eaton, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he called Mr. Rumsfeld “incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically.” General Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi army troops in 2003-04, said “Mr. Rumsfeld must step down.”

Also, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, a longtime critic of Mr. Rumsfeld and the administration’s handling of the Iraq war, has been more vocal lately as he publicizes a new book. “The problem is that we’ve wasted three years” in Iraq, said General Zinni, who was the chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, in the late 1990s.He added that he “absolutely” believes that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.

On Tuesday General Peter Pace, who is the first Marine to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attempted to tamp down the revolt of the retired generals. No officers were muzzled during the planning of the invasion of Iraq, he said. “We had then and have now every opportunity to speak our minds, and if we do not, shame on us,” he said at a Pentagon briefing.

A counselor to the Defense Department, Lawrence Di Rita, disagreed with the retired generals’ characterizations of Mr. Rumsfeld’s style. “People are entitled to their opinions. What they are not entitled to is their own facts. … The assertions about inadequate exposure to military judgment are just fundamentally incorrect.”

Other retired generals said they think it is unlikely that the denunciations of Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides will cease. “A lot of them are hugely frustrated,” in part because Mr. Rumsfeld gave the impression that “military advice was neither required nor desired” in the planning for the Iraq war, said retired Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson, who until last year commanded Marine forces in the Pacific theater.

Military experts expressed some concern about the new outspokenness of retired generals. “I think it flatly is a bad thing,” a military historian at the University of North Carolina, Richard Kohn, who writes frequently on civil military relations, said. He said he worries that it could undermine civilian control of the military, especially by making civilian leaders feel they need to be careful about what they say around officers, for fear of being denounced by those officers as soon as they retire.

Also, the generals themselves may be partly to blame for the fiasco in Iraq, along with Mr. Rumsfeld and the White House, said Michael Vickers, an analyst at a Washington think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “It’s just absurd to lay the blame on Don Rumsfeld alone,” he said.