Editors Note -- Retired General Anthony Zinni is a decorated Vietnam
War veteran, four-star Marine general and former Central Command Chief
in Charge of all U.S. Forces in the Persian Gulf Region. In addition
Zinni Was Selected Personally by George W. Bush as U.S. Special Envoy
to the Middle East in 2001. His comments come as a stark reminder that
White House war plans face opposition even at the highest levels. -ma
Four-Star Marine General: Iraq Strategy "Screwed-Up"
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday 23 December 2003
Anthony C. Zinni's opposition to U.S. policy on Iraq began on the
monsoon-ridden afternoon of Nov. 3, 1970. He was lying on a Vietnamese
mountainside west of Da Nang, three rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle
in his side and back. He could feel his lifeblood seeping into the
ground as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
He had plenty of time to think in the following months while
recuperating in a military hospital in Hawaii. Among other things, he
promised himself that, "If I'm ever in a position to say what I think
is right, I will. . . . I don't care what happens to my career."
That time has arrived.
Over the past year, the retired Marine Corps general has become
one of the most prominent opponents of Bush administration policy on
Iraq, which he now fears is drifting toward disaster.
It is one of the more unusual political journeys to come out of
the American experience with Iraq. Zinni still talks like an
old-school Marine -- a big-shouldered, weight-lifting, working-class
Philadelphian whose father emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region, and
who is fond of quoting the wisdom of his fictitious "Uncle Guido, the
plumber." Yet he finds himself in the unaccustomed role of rallying
the antiwar camp, attacking the policies of the president and
commander in chief whom he had endorsed in the 2000 election.
"Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of
planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy,"
he says. "The longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and
not altering our approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut
out of the fire."
Three years ago, Zinni completed a tour as chief of the Central
Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East, during
which he oversaw enforcement of the two "no-fly" zones in Iraq and
also conducted four days of punishing airstrikes against that country
in 1998. He even served briefly as a special envoy to the Middle East,
mainly as a favor to his old friend and comrade Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell.
Zinni long has worried that there are worse outcomes possible in
Iraq than having Saddam Hussein in power -- such as eliminating him in
such a way that Iraq will become a new haven for terrorism in the
Middle East.
"I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen
if this isn't done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a
contained Saddam is now," he told reporters in 1998. "I don't think
these questions have been thought through or answered." It was a
warning for which Iraq hawks such as Paul D. Wolfowitz, then an
academic and now the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, attacked him in
print at the time.
Now, five years later, Zinni fears it is an outcome toward which
U.S.-occupied Iraq may be drifting. Nor does he think the capture of
Hussein is likely to make much difference, beyond boosting U.S. troop
morale and providing closure for his victims. "Since we've failed thus
far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he says, "I don't have
confidence we will do it now. I believe the only way it will work now
is for the Iraqis themselves to somehow take charge and turn things
around. Our policy, strategy, tactics, et cetera, are still screwed
up."
'Where's the Threat?'
Anthony Zinni's passage from obedient general to outspoken
opponent began in earnest in the unlikeliest of locations, the
national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was there in
Nashville in August 2002 to receive the group's Dwight D. Eisenhower
Distinguished Service Award, recognition for his 35 years in the
Marine Corps.
Vice President Cheney was also there, delivering a speech on
foreign policy. Sitting on the stage behind the vice president, Zinni
grew increasingly puzzled. He had endorsed Bush and Cheney two years
earlier, just after he retired from his last military post, as chief
of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq.
"I think he ran on a moderate ticket, and that's my leaning --
I'm kind of a Lugar-Hagel-Powell guy," he says, listing three
Republicans associated with centrist foreign policy positions.
He was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for
attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he
is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and
against us."
Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central
Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He
was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about
Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my
time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once --
did it say, 'He has WMD.' "
Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained
current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and
the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the
beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts,
'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."
Zinni's concern deepened as Cheney pressed on that day at the
Opryland Hotel. "Time is not on our side," the vice president said.
"The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action."
Zinni's conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage that day was
that the Bush administration was determined to go to war. A moment
later, he had another, equally chilling thought: "These guys don't
understand what they are getting into."
Unheeded Advice
This retired Marine commander is hardly a late-life convert to
pacifism. "I'm not saying there aren't parts of the world that don't
need their ass kicked," he says, sitting in a hotel lobby in Pentagon
City, wearing an open-necked blue shirt. Even at the age of 60, he
remains an avid weight-lifter and is still a solid, square-faced slab
of a man. "Afghanistan was the right thing to do," he adds, referring
to the U.S. invasion there in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime and its
allies in the al Qaeda terrorist organization.
But he didn't see any need to invade Iraq. He didn't think
Hussein was much of a worry anymore. "He was contained," he says. "It
was a pain in the ass, but he was contained. He had a deteriorated
military. He wasn't a threat to the region."
But didn't his old friend Colin Powell also describe Hussein as a
threat? Zinni dismisses that. "He's trying to be the good soldier, and
I respect him for that." Zinni no longer does any work for the State
Department.
Zinni's concern deepened at a Senate hearing in February, just
six weeks before the war began. As he awaited his turn to testify, he
listened to Pentagon and State Department officials talk vaguely about
the "uncertainties" of a postwar Iraq. He began to think they were
doing the wrong thing the wrong way. "I was listening to the panel,
and I realized, 'These guys don't have a clue.' "
That wasn't a casual judgment. Zinni had started thinking about
how the United States might handle Iraq if Hussein's government
collapsed after Operation Desert Fox, the four days of airstrikes that
he oversaw in December 1998, in which he targeted presidential
palaces, Baath Party headquarters, intelligence facilities, military
command posts and barracks, and factories that might build missiles
that could deliver weapons of mass destruction.
In the wake of those attacks on about 100 major targets,
intelligence reports came in that Hussein's government had been shaken
by the short campaign. "After the strike, we heard from countries with
diplomatic missions in there [Baghdad] that the regime was paralyzed,
and that there was a kind of defiance in the streets," he recalls.
So early in 1999 he ordered that plans be devised for the
possibility of the U.S. military having to occupy Iraq. Under the code
name "Desert Crossing," the resulting document called for a nationwide
civilian occupation authority, with offices in each of Iraq's 18
provinces. That plan contrasts sharply, he notes, with the reality of
the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation power, which
for months this year had almost no presence outside Baghdad -- an
absence that some Army generals say has increased their burden in
Iraq.
Listening to the administration officials testify that day, Zinni
began to suspect that his careful plans had been disregarded.
Concerned, he later called a general at Central Command's headquarters
in Tampa and asked, "Are you guys looking at Desert Crossing?" The
answer, he recalls, was, "What's that?"
The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration
officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that
interventionist "neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation
into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I
saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who
didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there.
These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an
idea that worked on the ground."
And the more he dwelled on this, the more he began to believe
that U.S. soldiers would wind up paying for the mistakes of Washington
policymakers. And that took him back to that bloody day in the sodden
Que Son mountains in Vietnam.
A Familiar Chill
Even now, decades later, Vietnam remains a painful subject for
him. "I only went to the Wall once, and it was very difficult," he
says, talking about his sole visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on
the Mall. "I was walking down past the names of my men," he recalls.
"My buddies, my troops -- just walking down that Wall was hard, and I
couldn't go back."
Now he feels his nation -- and a new generation of his soldiers
-- have been led down a similar path.
"Obviously there are differences" between Vietnam and Iraq, he
says. "Every situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels the same
chill. "It feels the same. I hear the same things -- about
[administration charges regarding] not telling the good news, about
cooking up a rationale for getting into the war." He sees both
conflicts as beginning with deception by the U.S. government, drawing
a parallel between how the Johnson administration handled the
beginning of the Vietnam War and how the Bush administration touted
the threat presented by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I think
the American people were conned into this," he says. Referring to the
1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson administration
claimed that U.S. Navy ships had been subjected to an unprovoked
attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the case for
WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind."
Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by
imposing democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the
1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest
of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands.
And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative
allies as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons
came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow,
the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."
He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials
have taken responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat
posed by Iraq. "What I don't understand is that the bill of goods the
neocons sold him has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he
says. "Where is the accountability? I think some fairly senior people
at the Pentagon ought to go." Who? "That's up to the president."
Zinni has picked his shots carefully -- a speech here, a
"Nightline" segment or interview there. "My contemporaries, our
feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam,
where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he
said at a talk to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers and others at a
Crystal City hotel ballroom in September. "I ask you, is it happening
again?" The speech, part of a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval
Institute and the Marine Corps Association, received prolonged
applause, with many officers standing.
Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response