posted on May 26, 2004 04:25:34 PM new
General Zinni on What Went Wrong
May 22, 2004
Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.) Remarks at CDI Board of Directors Dinner, May 12, 2004
"I just came back from giving a lecture at UCLA yesterday, and the lecture was on the Middle East. I tried to ... for the students there, step back and take a more strategic view of the Middle East and the issues out there and maybe give them a perception of the problems and issues from the eyes of those that live with it day-to-day, the Arabs, Israelis, all those that make up the peoples of the Middle East.
On the way back I was thinking about what to talk about here and I know Iraq is a hot topic and I thought I would stay with Iraq. And I thought on the airplane about how history is going to record what happened in Iraq, how we got into it, and obviously it's too early to tell. And oftentimes the outcome defines how history characterizes it.
But I thought about how much has been misconstrued about what has happened so far, especially at a time when I commanded CENTCOM and we were in the process of containing Iraq as part of the policy. And I thought about the mistakes we made, that as Bruce (Blair, President of CDI) said, I've commented on before.
And what I thought I would do tonight is go through the ten crucial mistakes to this point that we've made. Because I think it helps frame what, in fact, has happened over time ... and is going to be the first part of that history. And I will conclude with maybe some thoughts on the way ahead, at least from my point of view.
I think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I believe it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not sure ... but at some point I heard him say that "containment did not work." That's not true.
I was responsible, along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to his two successors, that were my predecessors, myself, and my successor, General Franks, up until the war, we were responsible for containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about that containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 accepting the UN resolution to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the UN resolution, and not after the war, going to Baghdad, breaking the coalition, ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly saw would be a burden on us, our military, our treasure, and would break relations around the region, and would put him outside what he considered his international legitimacy for doing this - the resolution by which he operated and conducted the war, and the resolution by which we established the sanctions.
Administering those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought. In the entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day we had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at the Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On any given day ... on an average day in CENTCOM, we had about 23,000 troops, soup to nuts. Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that with these 23,000 troops, the whole region. To top it off, those troops were not assigned to CENTCOM. In other words, that structure wasn't created to be part of CENTCOM, like the troops are in the Pacific Command or in the European Command, these were troops that were on rotation. They came from other places, from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific region. And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never created a structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we could up the rheostat or lower it when we needed to.
It was in my view, what we would call in the military, an "economy of force theatre" without these assigned forces. We had no American bases out there. We were sharing bases with allies in the region who provided for us. Any given year, those in the region ponied up $300-500 million to support our presence out there. What we called "assistance in-kind." They provided the fuel, the food, the water, the things we needed. The Saudis built a $240 million housing complex for our troops. Never once when we decided to take action against Saddam, when he violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the inspectors operated under, never once were we denied permission to use bases, or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any particular arrangement.
During that time, when we asked allies in that region to join us in other conflicts, like Somalia, they came. Egyptians came. Pakistanis came. The Saudis came. The Kuwaitis came. The Emirates came and provided forces. They joined us in the Balkans. They joined us elsewhere on operations when we needed them. We ran the largest military exercises in the world ... in this part of the world. In Egypt we did "Bright Star." We built a magnificent coalition of forces, without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its size from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left command, not only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete equipment, ill-trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot of absenteeism. We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable force. We saw them as a decaying force.
We couldn't account for all the weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors that were in there had to assume that the weapons of mass destruction that were in his original inventory that we could not account for, might still be there. So that was always a planning factor. But when you look hard at that, these were artillery shells, rocket rounds, that he would have to be hiding somewhere that were getting old. And if he had to bring them out and use them, think about this, he's got to move them to artillery positions, to battery positions, under total dominance of the air by the United States. I sure as hell wouldn't have been ... want to be that battery commander that said tomorrow you're going to get five truckloads of chemical weapons to be stored in your area to shoot. Not under the air power we brought down and the ability to interdict them. And these were tactical capabilities.
Much has been made, which confuses me, about unmanned aerial vehicles. We monitored the L-29 program ... a trainer that he was trying to put tanks on. Never once in my experience did he ever fly it unmanned. He usually crashed it even manned. And in order to even hit Kuwait, he would have to bring it into the no-fly zone and launch it from an air base where we didn't allow aircraft to fly from, and we would have taken it out -- preemptively.
We bombed him almost at will. No one in the region felt threatened by Saddam. No one in the region denied us our ability to conduct sanctions. Many countries joined us in sanctions enforcement, in the no-fly zones, and in the maritime intercept operations where we attempted to intercept his oil and gas smuggling.
So to say containment didn't work, I think is not only wrong from the experiences we had then, but the proof is in the pudding, in what kind of military our troops faced when we went in there. It disintegrated in front of us. It didn't have the capabilities, that were pumped up, that were supposedly possessed by this military. And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others. It's not a pleasant thing to have to administer, it requires troops full-time, there are moments when there ... there are periods of violence, but containment is a lot cheaper than the alternative, as we're finding out now. So I think that will be mistake number one: discounting the effectiveness of the containment.
A side note on that. The process of containment created an "alliance," which I would put in quotation marks, in the region. We located our forces in all six GCC, Gulf Cooperation Council countries. When we deployed, we made sure that we got everybody in the region pregnant when we acted, and deployed, and enforced sanctions. We deliberately put our troops in positions and operating out of bases where everybody had to make a political commitment. That was the rule and everybody understood it. And we built an arrangement out there, a security arrangement, through the enforcement of those sanctions, that I think helped us create stability. I think we made a mistake in not capitalizing on that. I think the Clinton doctrine and policy of engagement was right, but we never really got the resources or authority to do it to its fullest extent. I think there was a reluctant Congress to provide those kinds of resources, but that would have been cheaper by half. The idea to regionalize our problems and allow us to build the forces within a region that can deal with these problems, I think is a much more powerful idea. We could have done that in Africa, we could have done that in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and elsewhere.
The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.
The idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms. The idea that we will have people that will glom on to democracy overnight. The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape, and change the Middle East by this action -- we've changed it all right.
So we had a basic flawed strategy. All those that believed this was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change out there, or some sort of revolutionary change in the region, I think got more than they bargained for, and didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation, and the issues, and the effect that what they were about to do was going to have on those.
The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not there. I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one month before the war, and Senator Lugar asked me: "General Zinni, do you feel the threat from Saddam Hussein is imminent?" I said: "No, not at all. It was not an imminent threat. Not even close. Not grave, gathering, imminent, serious, severe, mildly upsetting, none of those."
I predicted that the fighting would be over, the organized resistance in three weeks. To Tommy Franks' credit, he did it in 19 days. He beat my prediction. He did a magnificent job, as did our troops. But the rationale that we faced an imminent threat, or a serious threat, was ridiculous. Now, wherever history lays that, whether the intelligence was flawed or it was exaggerated, remains to be seen. I have my own opinions.
We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort. To the credit of President Bush 41, he set a standard that held up throughout the post-cold war period up until the Iraq war very well. He went to the United Nations before we undertook the operation to expel Saddam from Kuwait. Tremendous diplomatic effort to get a resolution from the United Nations to authorize the use of force and then a tremendous diplomatic effort on his part to create what I think is one of the most remarkable coalitions, the coalition we had in the Gulf war, where we had Arab countries, Islamic countries, European countries, contributions from the Far East all over the world. That model was extremely successful, and if you think about it, every intervention we had since we used the model, and it worked. We did it in Somalia, in Haiti, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, East Timor, there were variations on it, but it always started with that UN resolution.
Where we felt that we had to lead because we were the only ones that could do it, or it was in our vital national interests, we led. But we had magnificent coalitions. When I was in Somalia, we had to cut off the number of contributing countries in the phase that we led to 26, we had 44 commitments when we had to say, "Enough! The law of diminishing returns is setting in here in Somalia." In East Timor, the Australians took the lead, and we supported it. But again it was the international authority, the international legitimacy given to us by that UN resolution. And if you think about it, every time we were successful, not only did we get the UN resolution that we needed for the Gulf War, we got it again in '93 and in '98 when we needed to use force, we got the authorization in the wording we needed during the enforcement of the sanctions to use force.
Why would we believe that we would not get it this time? Why would we believe that this time for some reason, unlike before, the inspectors would not call the shots honestly? The inspectors don't make judgments they just make reports of facts. We have Americans on inspection teams. Ralph Ekeus, Richard Butler, they always came across with an honest assessment of what was happening. Why, suddenly, was Mohamed El Baradei and Hans Blix suspect? And what was the rush to war?
I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task. And I think those of us that knew that region, former commanders in chief, I guess we can't use that term anymore - part of transformation is to change the lexicon - but former combatant commanders of U.S. Central Command, beginning with Gen. Schwarzkopf, have said you don't understand what you're getting into. You are not going to go through Edelman's "cakewalk;" you are not going to go through Chalabi's dancing in the streets to receive you. You are about to go into a problem that you don't know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.
I can't understand why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it's been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has, and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept, in the kind of time and effort that was given as an estimate as to what it would take.
The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci Guerillas" from London. We bought into their intelligence reports. To the credit of the CIA, they didn't buy into it, so I guess the Defense Department created its own boutique intelligence agency to vet them. And we ended up with a group that fed us bad information. That led us to believe that we would be welcomed with flowers in the streets; that led us to believe that this would be a cakewalk.
When I testified before Congress in 1998, after a grilling from Senator McCain and all those wonderful senators supported the Iraqi Liberation Act, and I told them that these guys are not credible and they are going to lead us into something they we will regret. At that time, they were pushing a plan that Central Command would supply air support and special forces, and we would put it into Iraq, and they would pied piper their way up to Baghdad and the whole place would fall apart. This plan was created by two senate staffers and a retired General. I happened to be the commander of central command, nobody bothered to ask me about how my troops would be used. And they were a little bit upset about me being upset about this. These exiles did not have credibility inside the country or in the region. Not only did they not have credibility, it was clear that the information they were providing us many times was not correct and accurate. We believed in them. We also brought them in with us and deemed them into the governing council and the reception by Iraqis has been, to say the least, has not been great.
The seventh problem has been the lack of planning. I testified again during that period with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, right behind the panel of planners from the State Department and the Department of Defense, and I listened to them describe a "plan." I understood and knew that Gen. Franks and CENTCOM, would do their part. I knew damn right well the security piece would be taken care of, and I knew we had a good plan. I didn't hear anything that told me that they had the scope of planning for the political reconstruction, the economic reconstruction, social reconstruction, the development of building of infrastructure for that country. And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.
In my time at CENTCOM, we actually looked at a plan for reconstruction, and actually developed one at CENTCOM because I though that we, the military, would get stuck with it. In my mind, we needed formidable teams at every provincial level. 18 teams. The size of the CPA was about the size we felt we needed for one province, let alone the entire country of Baghad [sic] (Iraq), to do those other parts.
The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq. I know when that plan was presented, the secretary of defense said it was "old and stale." It sounded pretty new and fresh to me, and looking back at it, now because there were a hell of a lot more troops. It was more the (Eric) Shinseki model that I think might have been a hell of a lot more effective to freeze the situation. Those extra divisions we had in there were not to defeat the Republican Guard, they were in there to freeze the security situation because we knew the chaos that would result once we uprooted an authoritarian regime like Saddam's.
The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure. 144 bodies scraped from embassies around the world, people that I know, for fact, walked in and were selected and picked and put in the positions. Never quite fully manned-up until well into the operation. Never the kinds of qualifications or the breadth, and scope and depth it needed to work the problems down to the grassroots level. Changing horses in mid-stream, General Garner, I guess we can't say that he's fired. I found out tonight from Mark Thompson that the Defense Department claims he wasn't fired. But Jay Garner leaves, and in comes Jerry Bremer, third quarter, you're down seven, bring in the back-up quarterback and part of his job is to create the game plan while he's out there.
And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you've alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don't have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time. Business men who I ran into in the region out there in the region, who wanted to re-start their business, get jobs. They were told by the CPA "You can't do business because you were a Baathist!" They said to me, I had to say I was a Baathist. You don't do business in Iraq under Saddam if you're not a Baathist. Imagine throwing the Communists out of Russia at the end of the war.
Disbanding the Army, this is one I'll never understand because when I arrived at CENTCOM as the commander, there was an on-going program started by my predecessors to run a psychological operations campaign against the regular Army. Every time we struck Iraq, we dropped leaflets on regular Army formations and garrisons saying "If you don't fight when the time comes, we'll take care of you." We sent messages to them to this affect through people in the region. When I did interviews on Al Jazeera TV and other Arab networks, I would always mention the poor Iraqi soldiers of the regular Army - victims of Saddam. We had always intended if they didn't fight, we'd get rid of the leadership, we'd keep them in tact, we'd provide for some of their training, and we would have the basis for a ready-made force to pick up some of the security requirements. But they were disbanded. And on and on and on, we've had this series of mistakes. Lack of a dialogue or identification of the leadership in the Sunni and the Shia areas. The inability to connect with the leadership down there. Somebody like Sistani who doesn't even talk to Jerry Bremer - I don't think they've ever had a conversation, he refuses to see him. We have now found ourselves in a position to date for these series of mistakes and many, many more, where we are. Which I think is clearly evident.
Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it's not Mark Thompson it's somebody else, and says "What would you do now?" You know, there's a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it's time to just pull out, cut your losses. I'm not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we've come pretty close to that.
I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That's been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need.
We can't keep dropping paper on the UN, it's time for a group of adults, called the Perm Five, the permanent five members of the Security Council, to sit down and come up with some agreeable, mutually developed UN resolution that would allow other countries now to participate. And I think there are many out there at different levels, especially in the region, that would want to participate and help and before it comes too tough and too costly, we need to get them in. It will probably mean some of these Perm Five members and others will want to have a say in the political reconstruction and economic reconstruction, but so what?
If we create a free economy in Iraq, someday, probably sooner that later, some oil minister is going to cut a contract with the French. Guess what? That's inevitable. So why not start up front, admitting that. We need the UN resolution, that's the number one priority.
After getting that, I would first go to the countries in the region asking their help. I would do things like ask the countries to give us five or six officers for each of our battalions and regiments and brigades and above, five or six Arab officers that have attended our schools. For each of those units, that have gone to our command and general staff colleges, that not only speak English but know us, and we know them. And I'd put them on the planning staffs of these units, as advisors, as planners. If I'm a battalion commander down there in the middle of Fallujah or Najaf, I need more than some kid who happens to be of Arab descent and speaks Arabic that I drug over there and probably doesn't speak the dialect. I would like to have five or six of these guys that I went to school with, that I know, that would be there, that would be seconded there for me as planners, advisors, and to help me in these situations.
I would ask these countries in the region to allow us to build camps along the borders of Iraq, to train police, border security, and Army. I would lure the young men into these positions by considerable pay for what they are about to do, and they would deserve it. I would ask the Europeans and the others to help us build a training program, one that would last a long time, maybe even a year, to develop truly competent security forces with high morale, organizational coherence, the equipment and the pay that would make them proud. It may mean we're going to have to gut it out for a while. But it means that we have at least an end-state where we are going to put credible security forces and Iraqi forces on the ground. I would ask those countries that can commit those forces to help us, not only in patrolling cities that may be casualty traps, but in securing the borders.
There is a Ho Chi Minh trail here. Somewhere, somehow people are getting in the jihadis. I don't believe the Iraqis are blowing themselves up. They're coming from outside. We have insufficient forces to protect borders. I can't believe that we control all the major routes in and out from Kuwait and Jordan, when everyday I see another IED, improvised explosive device, blow up another fuel convoy coming down that road. Forces that protect road networks - that isn't a casualty intensive or difficult task - those are the kinds of forces under a UN agreement, that I think we can get in there to perform those missions, to use the Powell doctrine and putting some overwhelming force on the critical nodes, and the critical routes, and the critical infrastructure we need to protect. I would hold a conference somewhere in the region, ask the Arabs to sponsor it, although I would provide support.
I would invite every Iraqi business man I can convince to come, and I would invite foreign investors, and I would ask them to come together, hold this conference over a period of weeks, to define what these business men need to establish their business, to make it grow, to re-establish it, to protect it, the kind of investment they need, the infrastructure, but the key is jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs for Iraqis. I would go to the contractors in there, and say, I don't want to see truck drivers that are coming from Peoria, Illinois. I want to pay truck drivers that are Iraqis. It doesn't take a hell of a lot of talent to drive a truck. Why aren't Iraqis driving trucks for their own reconstruction and redevelopment? Why are people from outside coming in, where they have no investment in protecting and providing for the security and the movement of those goods?
The Halliburtons and Bechtels and, and others ought to be encouraged to hire locally, unless there is a skills set that isn't present there. But I almost can't believe that you couldn't find that in there. I think we need to start talking about the kind of government we're going to eventually have in this nation. Is it a confederation? A federation? What kind of local autonomy are the Shi'a, the Kurds, the Sunnis, going to have? What will be the status of Baghdad? No one has talked about that structure publicly. We're about to turn this over to some interim council and we're heading towards, six months from now, an election; an election where the electorate is educated on how to vote Friday prayers from the pulpit.
There's no system of education for the electorate. There are no political parties that I see and have been developed openly - there are certainly some growing that I would be suspicious of. And I think that unless we come to grips with the form of government, unless we work openly and in a transparent manner to develop political parties, and this has to be under international UN supervision, and unless we run a program of education for the electorate, we're not going to like the results we see by the end of January when the supposed elections are going to take place.
Those are just a few ideas. But I think it takes quality people on the ground to be able to implement these, it takes international authority and not the U.S. stamp on it, because that's not acceptable anymore. It's going to be a period of time where we're going to have to bear the burden of the most severe security responsibilities. But we ought to at least plan for a time when we can turn that over, and at least share some of the less demanding security experiences and variances. And I'm convinced that if we open this up and get the UN resolution, there will be those that will come in and stand by our side, boot-to-boot, on some of the tougher missions.
We also have to stop the tough talk rhetoric. One thing you learn in this business is, don't say it unless you're going to do it. In this part of the world, strength matters. And if you say you are going to go in and wipe them out, you better do it. If you say you're going to do it and then you back off and find another solution, you have lost face. And we have got to stop the kind of bravado and talk that only leads us into trouble out there. We need to be more serious and more mature in what we project as an image. Our whole public relations effort out there has been a disaster. I read the newspapers from the region every night online, and if you watch Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, or even some of the more moderate stations out there, and you read the editorials in the newspaper, there is a different war being portrayed in that region. A different conflict than we're getting from Fox, CNN, CBS, et cetera. And we better get the two jibed somehow, because that has been a massive failure. And there again, we could use advice from the region as to how to go about it. Thank you for you attention. I'd be glad to take any questions you may have."
Question and Answer session:
BRUCE BLAIR: That was a stunning tour de force and a compelling blueprint. Thank you very much. We’re grateful for your presentation. And, we’ll start with Seth. It’s our tradition. Seth?
SETH GLICKENHAUS: You were presenting an extremely persuasive and convincing plan for how to do something constructive. From this point on in Iraq, is there any possibility that your plan, or some slight modification of it, could be presented to President Bush very seriously by you and possibly some other prestigious associates you have? And is there any possibility that this would be adopted?
GENERAL ANTHONY ZINNI: Well, I want to be clear. I don’t have a plan. I have some ideas or thoughts in each of the areas: political, economic, security. This is… I gave you sort of the Whitman’s Sampler of a few ideas. I don’t think…the worst thing we could do is create another U.S. plan. There are a lot of good ideas out there. Some ideas I hear, I hear from people in the region that are friends, I hear from people back here.
I think it’s time to take the U.S. imprimatur off of this idea…off of this and bring people together, Americans too, with ideas, but especially others and especially from the region, to get engaged in some sort of formal consultation process to say, let’s sit down together and let’s…these are some thoughts or ideas. A few that I’ve expressed here and I have some others. But, again, it’s not a plan. It’s a set of ideas. And some may work, some may not. They will have some. But, to go in to this country and say, here is a collection of ideas that we can mold into a plan that has been developed by the international community, and especially by people in the region that know the culture and know the situation and have had to live with it. I think is much more powerful than somebody back here coming with a plan or us walking out there with something else that automatically - when we lay it down - is going to be questioned.
Look, the plan for the future of Iraq has to be done by Iraqis, by people in the region and by the international community not just handed to them by Americans.
I found out from a friend of mine who is in the CPA, that there are members of the CPA running around Iraq now giving lectures on Jefferson.
Now, I like Thomas Jefferson. I’m a Virginian. But, he’s another dead white guy out there, you know. And, we could be doing more useful things, I think, than that, with the people out there.
And, soliciting from them the ideas. You know, it’s like the idea of how can we best create jobs? How can we best provide security for your business? If you’re a construction company owner in a place that you could potentially expand your business. You need to…
(Break in continuity of tape)
I’m in the position to …in Virginia, catching fish (laughter)…I’m not too popular up here. I only come up when Bruce asks me to come.
(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE): I think things may have reached the point even with the president and his advisors, where they might be more receptive to a program, beginning where you want to begin, with the U.N.’s full cooperation…I think it’s more…
ZINNI: What I’m offering is not a plan or a program. It’s some idea to throw on the table. But the idea is to bring people together to develop these things more fully and to add their ideas to this. Especially people who know what they’re talking about, that know the region, know the area, or have a vested interest in the outcome.
BLAIR: I have a feeling I’m going to be told to undertake a new project tomorrow morning, to pull this together, with you and others.
PHIL COYLE: Gen. Zinni, I think the administration claims 38 countries are in the coalition.
ZINNI: Yeah. Fiji, I think, was a big contributor. (Laughter)
COYLE: ...The president began to recite them in his last State of Union message. Why is their 38 countries not international, and your 26, or whatever you said you had, were. What’s the difference?
ZINNI: First of all, there’s a term that Rich (Eric) Shinseki that when you are in these operations, you got swimmers and non-swimmers. And you’d like to have a hell of a lot more swimmers than non-swimmers. Just being able to tick off a list of countries - some of which that most of us without a globe or a map would have difficulty locating - how many real swimmers are there out there?
Secondly, in those countries that have committed forces, how did their people feel about their forces being there? I’m getting calls from media and others in countries that are very close allies to us where the governments that have made a commitment. That commitment on the street isn’t anywhere near as strong. As a matter of fact, the other way (is true). I think a U.N. resolution makes it different. It’s not a U.S. war. It is a U.N. war. I think a U.N. resolution gets you more swimmers in the long run. That’s not to say the non-swimmers don’t have a place. Everybody can contribute. There is a way you can do it militarily or otherwise. Everybody can have a place. And what counts, in one sense, is the flags. But what counts is those flags being done in a way where they feel they have a say and it’s under international authority. So I go back to the swimmer/non-swimmer issue. I go back to the willing to burden-share. I go back to the point of when I go to my people, I say I’m not doing this for the United States. I’m doing this because, as a member of the United Nations, we committed as a body to this effort. That, I think that helps you in picking up some of the burden and sending some of the swimmers that we might need.
THERESA HITCHENS: I just want to ask a very simple question. I’m Theresa Hitchens. I’m the vice president of CDI. And I’m not a Middle East expert. I’m not an Iraq expert. I deal with other issues. But, from looking at this from the outside, I have a nine-year-old son…(unintelligible) I want to know why you think that at this point we can convince the U.N. and other people to get involved in this, when it’s going so horrifically badly? And when I have to turn down the newspaper everyday, I can’t let my son look at it. I’ll have to take it away to make sure he only sees the portion about the cicadas invading Washington, and not about beheadings. Why do you think that we, at this point of the game, where we are, which I think is the losing point of the game, would be able to get the kind of international support that we might have been able to get in a beginning stage? I agree with you, we could have done it and could have done it right. But, why, how do we do that now?
ZINNI: Because it’s in nobody’s interest to see Iraq turn into a chaotic state, a pit, a failed state, a sanctuary for extremism. I think everybody knows the outcome of that. It is in nobody’s interest to have Iraq, with all its resources to be a non-productive state. It is especially in nobody’s interest in that region to have Iraq as a failed, chaotic state on their borders. I don’t think the Europeans, French, German, Brits or others, want this to fail. The idea that “let’s not touch it and let it go completely to hell.” I don’t think that there is a country in the world that would accept that as an outcome. And if the only way to now treat this is through the international cooperation, which I think is in their interest to do it, with legitimacy of a U.N. resolution, with at least a commitment for their participation in the decision making, you can get that kind of commitment and it will go much easier on their streets to sell it to their people to do it. And I think that from the beginning, that would have been true. And I don’t think anybody wants to see us fail, because if we fail, the ramifications for them are great, no matter who they are, Europeans, Middle-Easterners, whoever.
LARRY KORB: General, Larry Korb. Under Goldwater-Nickles, the military are supposed to be able to talk to the president and the Congress, to tell them that. You’re quite right to talk about Gen. Shinseki. Where were the other chiefs when this planning for the war with all the optimistic scenarios were going? Don’t you think if they all have spoken out, it would have been harder for the administration to just push it along?
ZINNI: First of all, I’m not going to speak for the chiefs. And, I’m not going to speak against them in any way. I will tell you this. When I was a commander at U.S. Central Command, and Hugh Shelton was the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton sent us the book Dereliction of Duty. He required all of us 17 four-star General Commanders to read the book. And we all reported to Washington, I believe it was (the) 28th of January, 1998, for a breakfast meeting.
At that meeting was a then young Army Maj. McMaster who wrote the book. Dereliction of Duty describes the dereliction on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, who had strong feelings about all the mistakes that were being made, but didn’t speak their minds, and didn’t speak up, with the exception of former Commandant of the Marine Corps, David Shoup. The message to us, after we heard this, from Hugh Shelton is, that will never happen here. And the message to us from Secretary Cohen at that time, too, is that door is always open, and your obligation to the Congress, which is an obligation to the American people to tell them what you think, still stands strong. And that’s the expectation that we have.
They did not ever want to hear that we had a problem, something sticking our crawl, that we didn’t bring up to them, and we didn’t honestly express if we felt it had to be expressed. I can tell you there were times when I disagreed with the policy and I can tell you one time in particular that I was taken, personally, to a principals meeting, because the secretary and the chairman wanted to be sure that my views, which were different, were heard by the President.
Now, I think there is an obligation to speak the truth that when you’re confirmed, and when you raise your right hand in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and in front of whoever the administers that oath for your appointment. You answer to those many bosses. One is the secretary of defense and the president, another boss is the Congress, who represents the people. And you’re going to have to speak the truth, like (Eric) Rich Shinseki did. It’s painful at times. Believe me. I’ve been down that road. But it is an obligation that comes with the uniform. And I think if there are those, and I don’t know this one way or another, I don’t ask, if there are those wearing that uniform that have concerns and doubts about this or objections, and didn’t voice it, there is going to be a second edition of Dereliction of Duty down the road.
BOB JAMES: Secretary Powell had four, six months to try to sell the coalition to the U.N., apparently he was unable to do this….was the…
ZINNI: Well, you saw it differently than I did, because I saw him go to the U.N. and get a 15-and-0 vote for 1441, the resolution.
BOB JAMES: That’s right.
ZINNI: And we put the inspectors in. And the U.N. asked for the inspectors to play out their role. And in my mind in the way of thinking and looking at past history, that was maybe a six, nine-month, maybe even a year of process of the inspectors in there poking around.
I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw a diplomatic effort in New York, headed by the Secretary of State. That, in mind, the timeline was six, nine, twelve months. I saw a “go-to-war” timeline by (the) Secretary of Defense. He was going to war in March. If you know anything about military, you watch those deployments. That wasn’t deployment of forces in support of diplomacy. That was deployment of forces to go to war. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the heat of summer and we got to go or it’s too hot. The only people that exercise in the Gulf in the summer are Americans, you know (laughter). No Arab in his right mind is going to in the desert.
But I saw two different timelines. And if you’re going to pursue diplomacy…I heard a Congressman say the other day: “We tried it for seven months. What do you want?” Try it for 14. What was the rush, you know? I mean, I’ll go back to the point I made before. The painstaking approach that Bush 41 and others took to get the U.N. resolution first, to take the pains to build the coalition -- if you were to ask any military person to look at that coalition that General Schwarzkopf had built, a dual chain of command, not unity of command. Prince Khaled over certain forces, Arabic, Islamic forces. General Schwarzkopf over the other forces. The relationships within there are very tricky, and not all the same. I mean a Rue-Goldberg military wire diagram. But it worked. They made it work. And what was more important is they were together in this effort. And it takes time. The only time, the only reason you would do away with time is if the imminence of the threat was such that you couldn’t do that. But again, tell me were that threat, was that imminent? Where Saddam posed the threat to us that we couldn’t wait six more months, nine more months, even a year, for Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei to play it out?
Their predecessors all finally threw up their hands and said, “Non-compliance, non-cooperation, not full disclosure,” and made that report to the U.N. Security Council. And the U.N. Security Council provided the authorization after that. That’s been the track record. Why did we think it’d be otherwise now? Especially after Secretary Powell gets a unanimous 15-and-0 vote on the first resolution…
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Could you explain to me what happened to the Kurds after the first (Gulf) War?
ZINNI: Yes. I was involved with the Kurds. The Kurds believed that they had a moment. And they rebelled against Saddam. Saddam brutally crushed them. I think the Kurdish fighters, the Peshmerga, which in Kurdish means “those who face death”, were far better troops man-for-man, but the attack helicopters and the artillery in the air that Saddam used really brutalized them.
They were chased into the hills on the borders with Turkey. Turkey would not let them down out of the hills. This was winter time. They also went on to the Iranian side, too. In the part that we helped provide relief for the 10,000 that had died in the hills. We had over 500,000 Kurds stranded in those hills.
So we made the ultimate decision to bring them down and go back home. And we issued an ultimatum to Saddam that all his forces had to withdraw from that region. We outlined a security zone, which basically was generally along the lines of the Kurdish area, and we pushed Saddam’s forces out. We returned the Kurds to that area. We patrolled that area with air patrols. And we kept forces out there for a while, ground forces, but with a clear commitment they would re-enter if Saddam came back.
So, in effect, from 1991 up until the Gulf war, the Kurds had autonomy. Basically they were free and they were living under a security zone that we guaranteed and underwrote the protection for. And it lived that way. That’s a short version.
RACHEL FREEDMAN: Thank you. We’re consistently hearing what’s going wrong in Iraq. In your opinion, is anything going right?
ZINNI: Well, I’m sure that you’re going to find anecdotal evidence of good news stories out there. And, I agree to a certain extent, much of that doesn’t make news. You probably have a lot of efforts at the local level, where schools are rehabilitated, where local village councils are functioning and cooperating with US forces, where local little market economies are starting to move.
But, it’s a matter of relevant news, good versus bad. Is the good news, of which I’m sure there’s a lot of, sufficient enough to say you’ve tipped it in the right direction, versus the bad news?
On the bad side, I see an insurgency that is about in its mid-life. You know what happens, this is a classic Maoist insurgency. It’s not uniquely Islamist, it’s classically Maoist. You begin by disabling the infrastructure; frightening the people; attacking the outside interveners; attacking those that cooperate with them. Show them that the local authorities are ineffective. You do this by a series of violent acts, terrorist activities. We saw this in Vietnam. You saw it in classic insurgencies.
You then move to convince people that the government is powerless and corrupt; that the outside intervention forces are there as powers to dominate colonial powers. And you try to make the case that you are the only viable representative they have. And eventually you move that to civil war. Unless the insurgency completes itself and succeeds, you’ll move it to civil war.
The civil war will be between whoever, ethnic groups, more likely between those that support the good news, the change, the cooperation with the U.S. or whoever, and those that now reject it, that side with the other side.
When I was in Vietnam, my first tour of duty, I was an advisor with the Vietnamese Marines. So, I went to Vietnamese language school. And, I lived, I wore the uniform of the Vietnamese Marines and we lived in the villages. They had a quartering act. And I remember one time I was in the house of a family in northern part of South Vietnam and after dinner, the mother of the house said, “Do you have any pictures of your family?” And I showed them to her in her house. And she said, “Why are you here?”
And I said, “Oh, we’re here to…you, know, democracy, Jeffersonian democracy, free market economy, you’ll lead a great life.”
She said, “You want me to lead a great life?” She said, “Change things there.” And she pointed South.
I said, “You mean there, Hanoi”
She said, “No, I mean there, south.”
She said, “We’re stuck in between. They didn’t give us a good option. Are we supposed to die for that parade of Generals in Saigon, big men, little men, all the parade of generals that come through there that are corrupt? We’re stuck in between. A pox on both your houses. “
Does civil society have a voice? Civil society gets caught in between. And eventually the insurgents just try to make so that they’re better off with the insurgents. It’s at least the devil they know to stop the fighting. That’s what they would like to create here.
And the classic way you counter this is you have to better the environment. You have to make them want to fight for something. You have to protect them – populous and resources control, improve the environment, fight the guerrilla. These are the rules of insurgency that we all were brought up on.
And it fits here. This is an insurgency now. It has moved beyond terrorist actions, well into an insurgency. And it can get to the point of civil war: Shia on Shia, Sunni on Shia, any combination. Those that support U.S. reform and change, those that don’t, theocratic state supporters against those that want a democracy, whatever.
BLAIR: OK, one more…two more. David and Phil, then we should probably wrap it up. David Horowitz.
DAVID HOROWITZ: If your various policy suggestion are not adopted, and we continue down the same road, would you be willing to campaign against Bush, because that would be only change that could make a difference.
ZINNI: Well, I’m not interested in any political position. I mean…I don’t mean position for myself or taking a position.
HOROWITZ: Speaking in support of Kerry, I’d say.
ZINNI: I’m not interested in endorsing any political.
HOROWITZ: No, but would you make these points that you’ve made?
ZINNI: I’ve made these points. I made them on the record tonight. I’m not campaigning against of for anybody though.
HOROWITZ: Will you…
ZINNI: No. N. O.
DAVID HOROWITZ: Will you remain as an active spokesman?
Zinni: Look the reason…Let me say something personally here, and I mean this. This was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
Because when I spoke out on this, at the beginning, I was part of this administration. They entrusted me with the Middle East peace process, which I thought…And they did it in a way, that they fully gave me the trust, not a lot of guidance or direction, to let me to be able to do what I needed to do.
And I was very supportive of this administration. Certainly Secretary Powell and those in the State Department that I respect tremendously. It was not my desire to see this administration fail. If anything, I had an allegiance and I think, owed them something for the trust they gave me.
When this started to come about and I realized that it was wrong. I realized that if I speak out, I lose either way. If I’m wrong, you know, another guy who couldn’t figure it out. If I’m right, it means we have casualties, lost treasure and our image around the world is destroyed.
It was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. And so it was very painful to go down this road. I did not want to be right. I also knew by not being right, that was going to be painful too. But, it had to be said, because I can’t stand looking at the end of another news story and seeing the faces of those young kids.
My son is a Marine Officer in the infantry. I lost a member of my family in Iraq, the son of my cousin, already. So, it’s become very personal. Not to mention, just every one of those faces I see, I recognize. I mean, not directly, but these are, I mean, knew those sergeants and corporals and PFCs after 40 years, that paid a price for this, you know?
BLAIR: Phil Straus?
PHIL STRAUS: Phil Straus. An historical question…“Vietnam”…“quagmire” – those words, that we’re not supposed to say. What have we learned? What have we not learned? I’m particularly interested in issues around insurgency and media exposure and control of media and anything else you feel is important.
ZINNI: I think there are important lessons from Vietnam, that should have been applied here. I’m hesitant to start comparing Iraq with Vietnam. Because those that don’t want that comparison can certainly make a case for the differences. But, there are some strategic policy lessons, that we should have learned that time, that we should have thought through here.
Let me give you the first one. Make sure the strategy is right. You know, one of the things I said, flawed strategy. When the president gets to commit to this, all wars are political. I heard President Bush say in that Russert interview, “Well, Vietnam was a political war. “
All wars are political. This one is more political than Vietnam, I would argue. But, if you’re committing to this, what is the strategic objective? How will that be achieved? How will that meet our interests? What will be the cost of achieving that strategic objective?
You see, one of the problems we have is the only people who think strategically are the military. Because we happen to go to school to think that way. The frustration when you become a general is you walk in expecting strategic thinking and you don’t get it from the civilian side. Because they don’t go to the schools and they don’t think that way. They don’t think through the strategic center of gravity and how you affect it.
Let me give you an example – the War on Terrorism. I think we do a masterful job at the tactical level. We attack al Qaeda on the ground. We break down the finances. We break down the cells. We get law enforcement cooperation around the world doing wonderful damage to the organization. Yet, as an ideology and a movement, it has grown.
If I were to analyze, from a strategic point of view, al Qaeda - and, I’m not saying this is the right analogy, but it’s just an example - the strategic center of gravity for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is a pool of angry, young men willing to die. What causes angry young men willing to die?
They’re willing to die because there’s a political, economic or social reason. Some sense of disenfranchisement. Some sense of oppression that makes them angry, fires them up, and makes them tempted to come to al Qaeda. Now, that isn’t enough to get them to blow themselves up and to do horrific acts. You need a rationale. You need something that justifies what they do.
At the operational level, the center of gravity is the aberrant form of Islam that they’re able to use on them to provide the sense of reward, and rationale and justification for what the do. And then the set of tactics that work so well against us, because it is asymmetric.
If you think about it on those three levels, I have to go after this “War on Terrorism,” which is even a bad name. I have to go after this movement of extremism at three levels. How do I cut that flow of angry young men? How do I make sure that aberrant form of Islam is rejected? Or encourage others to, and I’ve got some thoughts on all this, but I won’t go into it here. And do the things that we do well at the tactical level. But, you don’t have that kind of strategic thinking
The second point about strategy is, we always underestimate the American people. We never sell the go to war on the strategic…on the strategy. It’s interesting in that when Tom Ricks did the article on the Secretary Wolfowitz and myself - in this, the (Washington) Post - there was a comment in there by Secretary Wolfowitz that said, “Sometimes the American people have to be pushed into these things.”
That made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What do you mean, pushed? Does it mean cook the books on the intelligence? We shade the truth? Does it mean we don’t give them the straight answer as to why we’re doing this?
Sell it to the American people on the merits of the strategic advantages for doing this.
You know, if you have a strategy, and you believe in it, and you believe it’s the right strategy. Sell it on its merits to the American people. Make them think strategically and accept it or not. Don’t sell it on a Gulf of Tonkin or a WMD imminent threat because in the end, that’s going to come back and get you. That’s a lesson from Vietnam.
The next thing you have to understand about these situations is you’re not going to succeed unless the people on the ground you’re trying to help have a vested interest in succeeding. They’ve got to own the problem. Right now the United States of America owns the problem in Iraq. Nobody else owns the problem. We own the problem. The Iraqis have to own this problem. When I see a truck driver from West Virginia in a fuel truck, I say the Iraqis don’t own the problem yet. If I saw an Iraqi driver in that truck, they own the problem.
If I see an Iraqi soldier on the street standing up, if I see an Iraqi making some political decisions, then I say, they own the problem.
Let me give you a small example.
When went through that, you know, “Weekend at Bernie’s” session with the sons of Saddam. After we got those two guys, I would’ve turned those bodies over to the Governing Council. Immediately.
And I would’ve said to the Governing Council, “You own them.” You can bury them according to Muslim tradition within 24 hours. You can show them on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. You can bury them and tell the people you verified who they are. They’re yours.
What did we do? We kept the bodies. We violated Muslim traditional burial. We showed them out to the world. We owned the problem and that was a small problem that could’ve been put, on their back, to begin kind of transferring that monkey. We don’t do enough of that in this business.
You know, we don’t look at the opportunities. We have to make sure they have a vested interest in success. That they don’t look at this as a “pox on both their houses” or “I’m gonna wait this one out to see who wins.”
You don’t want them to be in that position. That’s the first lesson of insurgency that you have to deal with. There are many more, but we don’t have time tonight.
