Date Posted: 5/14/2004

http://www.international.ucla.edu/print.asp?parentid=11162

General Anthony Zinni, former commander of Middle East Central Command, 
says the Iraq war was "a big mistake" and there was no plan for the 
reconstruction.

"We have gone in with no plan, not even a less-than-viable plan."

----

The U.S. should not have invaded Iraq without UN backing, there was no 
imminent threat from Saddam Hussein, and the invasion was done without any 
real plan for rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq after the war. If the 
speaker was a liberal columnist the assessment would not be surprising, 
but these were the views of recently retired Marine Corps General Anthony 
Zinni, a decorated Vietnam veteran who served with U.S. forces in Somalia 
and preceded Tommy Franks and John Abizaid as commander of Central 
Command, the nerve center of the U.S. military in the Middle East. He also 
served briefly as a Special Envoy to the Middle East for the current Bush 
administration at the request of his friend Colin Powell, until he became 
too critical of administration policy. General Zinni spoke at UCLA's 
Ackerman Union May 11 as the guest of the Ronald W. Burkle Center for 
International Relations.

Zinni called the invasion of Iraq "a big mistake on our part," describing 
it as "an unneeded bag of worms. It was elective surgery that didn't need 
to be done." He predicted that it was "going to be trouble for many years 
to come."

In the formal part of his talk, Zinni outlined his view of the roots of 
instability in the Middle East, citing joblessness as a major source of 
the angry young men being recruited into extremist Islamic organizations. 
In the question period, however, he took up more directly mistakes and 
failures of the Bush administration in the region. Following are some of 
General Zinni's responses to specific questions.
Prisoner Abuse at Abu Ghraib

"I just spoke to some Arab friends of mine recently, very senior, and they 
were just really destroyed by this, because they are very pro-American and 
they know the damage these images cause in their part of the world. And 
what they said to me, and what I already know, 'You would have been better 
off with pictures of troops executing them, shooting them in the head, 
than doing what they did. In this part of the world this is easily the 
worst atrocity that could have been committed, even worse than execution.' 
Where in our part of the world obviously we don't consider that. Nobody 
died, and maybe nobody was really physically harmed, so we don't see that 
as the worst of all situations. That humiliation is the worst of all 
situations.

"I have spent my life in the Caribbean, in the Far East, in Africa, in the 
Middle East, in Southwest Asia, and in Central Asia, in Europe, Eastern 
Europe. And what I find our biggest flaw is, we never take time to 
understand the culture. Some things we do that make perfect sense to us do 
not make perfect sense in their culture. You can look at Iraq and the 
thing that frustrated me was watching all the mistakes being made day to 
day: the de-Baathification, the disbanding of the army, bringing in exiles 
and propping them up as leadership -- everything that we could possibly 
make a mistake."

Solving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

"I think there are some things that are really evident about the process. 
First is, the president of the United States and his office need to be 
directly involved in this. I hate to say that. You would think, our 
president needs to be directly in the peace process, but this is so 
important and nothing short of that, not the secretaries or anybody else, 
can move this process. It takes that kind of commitment. The closest we've 
ever come to resolving this is when the president brought them to Camp 
David. Think about President Carter bringing Sadat and Begin there, and we 
have King Hussain and we get a peace agreement. When President Clinton 
brought Barak and Arafat we came close. But it takes that kind of 
commitment. That is politically, I know, distasteful. Sometimes damaging 
and difficult. And certainly the greatest leader of the free world, you 
would think has other priorities. But I'm afraid that's the number one 
going in thing.

"The other thing that has to happen is that we have to stop this business 
of special envoys. Of short term, high profile in and outs, touch and goes 
on this process. We need a big commitment. We need the world and us in 
there with a major commitment of diplomats and people on the ground 
working economic, political, security issues, how we are going to monitor 
it, full time, 24/7 on the ground. And looking for all sorts of ways to 
start programs and connections, even on the local level. Not trying to 
solve it only at the top, only between a Sharon and an Arafat, but maybe 
village to village, town to town, on agreements. You have to light a 
thousand fires here, not try to light one fuse."

How Does Iraq Today Compare to the Vietnam War?

"There are some ways in which Vietnam doesn't apply and some ways in which 
Vietnam does apply. I think you can certainly make the case looking at 
facts and geography and the situation, you could make the argument that 
there are two very different events and situations. I would make the case 
though that some of the strategic mistakes are very similar. First of all, 
in Vietnam we went in with a flawed strategy. Remember, the strategy was, 
we had to stop communism before the dominoes fell. All of Southeast Asia 
would come apart once Vietnam fell. Obviously it fell and the rest of 
Southeast Asia didn't. It was a flawed strategy.

"Here we have a strategy that we can change this part of the world by 
going into Iraq, installing democracy, and it's going to explode 
throughout the region. Comments like, the road to Jerusalem leads through 
Baghdad, when just the opposite is true. A flawed strategy.

"The second is the temptation to draw the American people in by cooking 
the books. We did it with the Gulf of Tonkin situation where we were led 
to believe there was an attack on our destroyers when they were innocently 
in international waters, when they weren't. They were in North Vietnam 
territorial waters supporting an operation that was going on. And here we 
have the case for WMD as an imminent threat for not using international 
authority to go in.

"We had a situation in Vietnam where we underestimated the threat or the 
situation. We have a case here where we underestimated the threat or the 
situation. We had a case in Vietnam where we went in without a viable 
plan. We have a case here where we have gone in with no plan, not even a 
less-than-viable plan.

"We made mistakes on the ground in Vietnam. We made tactical mistakes, we 
made policy mistakes. As an example, one year individual rotations, not 
mobilizing the reserves. We have made mistakes here, overmobilizing the 
reserves. . . . de-Baathification, not understanding the situation and the 
culture. So there are a lot of similarities."

He added a few sharp comments on the Rumsfeld Defense Department:

"I got in trouble for saying this before, but I like somebody in the chain 
of command that has smelled a little powder, as my father used to say, who 
was a World War I vet. If you smelled powder you have a different view, 
you think twice and you are very careful. If you haven't, it's just one 
big adventure until you have seen the first body. And unfortunately we 
don't have enough people -- all the warriors are in the State Department, 
Rich Armitage, Colin Powell, there are more medals in the State Department 
than there are in the Department of Defense, unfortunately."

What Do We Need to Do to Get Out?

"I think security is the most pressing problem there right now. It's hard 
to get past that. But the more substantial problem is jobs. You need to 
get the economy functioning. If the Iraqis have jobs I think they will 
stand up to the extremists that are trying to destroy their country much 
more firmly. If you don't have a job and you are unsure of the government 
and the security situation is bad, you have nothing. I saw this in 
Vietnam. We are seeing this again here. The people feel like they are 
caught in between. You've got to give the people something to fight for. 
And it's not enough just to say they can vote somebody in. They've not 
only got to vote somebody in, they have to have a sense of well-being."
George Bush, Senior, An Alternative Model for Foreign Intervention

"The first crisis we had after the cold war was Saddam's invasion of 
Kuwait. What is the way we are going to handle the first post-cold war 
bipolar world? George Bush [Senior] goes to tremendous pains to get a UN 
resolution. He uses the force of diplomacy to get a very difficult 
resolution. He then uses all his magnificent cabinet members to go out and 
build what I think was one of the most remarkable coalitions in history -- 
Arabs, Muslims, Europeans, Asians -- and he deals with this problem within 
the context of the international authority of the UN resolution under a 
coalition of U.S. leadership, because we have the wherewithal militarily. 
But he stays within the rumble strips of that lane. Within what the 
resolution provided, he removes Saddam from Kuwait. He then went back to 
the UN to get the UN resolutions for the sanctions and containment of 
Iraq. He didn't go to Baghdad, for a very good reason if you read what he 
and Scowcroft wrote. He didn't want to inherit the country, because he 
knew the problems would be up there, and he didn't want to violate the UN 
resolution, because it didn't authorize it, and he didn't want to break 
the coalition he had. So for twelve years we contained Iraq within this 
international framework. What did it cost us? We never lost a plane. We 
never even scratched the paint on a plane. The Arabs in the world paid 
$300 to $500 million a year to support our presence out there. When we 
went off to Somalia and other places -- Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo -- we did it 
the same way. He set the model for the next administration. They 
contributed forces. When I was in Somalia we had forces from Egypt, Saudi 
Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, a lot of Muslim countries. 
We had Egypt and United Arab Emirates with us in the Balkans. They liked 
the framework."

Why Wasn't There a Plan for Rebuilding Iraq?

"In 1998 we bombed Iraq. [Saddam Hussein] threw out the inspectors and we 
conducted an operation called Desert Fox, and we bombed facilities that 
could be used to develop weapons systems for WMD, because we didn't know 
if he had them or didn't have them, but we could hit missile production 
facilities, the intelligence headquarters, etc. At the end of that four 
days an interesting thing happened. I was commander of Central Command at 
the time, and we started to get reports from embassies that were in that 
they had never seen the government so shaken, almost paralyzed. And when I 
traveled around the region and spoke to Kuwaitis, Jordanians, and others, 
they said, 'You know, you are bombing them all the time, you are hitting 
them, and you are shaking them, what if he were to collapse? What if you 
got Saddam in a palace or somewhere, or the people rose up and its chaos? 
What are you going to do about it?'

"And it struck me then that we had a plan to defeat Saddam's army, but we 
didn't have a plan to rebuild Iraq. And so I asked the different agencies 
of government to come together to talk about reconstruction planning for 
Iraq. . . . I thought we ought to look at political reconstruction, 
economic reconstruction, security reconstruction, humanitarian need, 
services, and infrastructure development. We met in Washington, DC. We 
called the plan, and we gamed it out in the scenario, Desert Crossing. The 
first meeting surfaced all the problems that have exactly happened now. 
This was 1999. And when I took it back and looked at it, I said, we need a 
plan. Not all of this is a military responsibility. I went back to State 
Department, to the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Department of 
Commerce and others and said, all right, how about you guys taking part of 
the plan. We need a plan in addition to the war plan for the 
reconstruction. Not interested. Would not look at it. So at Central 
Command before I left -- I retired in 2000 -- I started a plan called 
Desert Crossing for the reconstruction of Iraq. Because I was convinced 
nobody in Washington was going to plan for it, and we, the military, would 
get stuck with it. So when I left in 2000 we were in the process of that 
planning. When it looked like we were going in, I called back down to 
Centcom and said, You need to dust off Desert Crossing. They said, What's 
that? Never heard of it. So in a matter of just a few years it was gone. 
The corporate memory. And in addition I was told, 'We've been told not to 
do any of the planning. It would all be done in the Pentagon.'

"In February [2003], the month before the war, I was called before the 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify on this, and the panel 
before me was the planner for the State Department and the planner for the 
Pentagon. And they were briefing their so-called plan. It was clear to me, 
and I testified to that effect afterwards in the next panel, that there 
was no plan. That they were way underestimating what they were getting 
into. That they had done virtually no planning. And that they were in for 
big trouble. And to answer your question why didn't they do it, the only 
thing I can say, they naively misjudged the scope and the complexity of 
the problems they were going to have. They thought they could do it seat 
of the pants."

Should We Just Get Out?

"Not yet, but it could be getting close. Unfortunately. I hate to say 
that. I want to see this work, from the bottom of my heart. And I think we 
keep making mistakes. The first rule if you find yourself in a hole is 
stop digging. We seem to keep digging. Nobody in the world, with the 
exception of the crazies and extremists and jihadis, wants us to fail. Not 
the French, not the Arabs, they want us to succeed. They don't agree with 
what we have done here and the way we've done it, the way we have gone in 
there, but everybody sees failure as far worse than crowing that I told 
you so. They don't want that. We have to come out with a stable Iraq. I 
think that the key is getting a UN resolution, going back to that model I 
mentioned that the first President Bush put in place. It should have been 
what we did in the first place. . . .

"It might have taken six months, nine months, or a year. But who cares? 
There was no imminent threat. Believe me. I saw the intelligence before 
the war. There was no imminent threat. Trust me. No imminent threat. I 
told Senator Lugar that, at my testimony a month before the war. He asked 
me, 'Is there an imminent threat?' I said no.

"We have to start there. We need a resolution by the UN that will allow 
other countries that want to and can help, especially in the region, to 
help us. We need to set up the security forces in Iraq so they are viable. 
That will take a while. We need to get Iraqi businessmen and foreign 
investors together. We need to protect their businesses. We need to get 
them up and started so there are jobs for Iraqis. We need a political 
process that makes sense. We need to create political parties that are 
transparent and viable. We've got to create a program of educating the 
electorate so that Friday prayers from the mosque isn't where they get 
their voting instructions. We need to set up a system of government that 
they all understand. They still don't know if there is going to be a 
confederation, a federation, we don't even know who we are going to turn 
it over to one month from now.

"And these things have to be resolved. . . . They are political, they are 
economic, they are security issues that we have wasted over a year in not 
really addressing in any substantial way. We have made a big mistake in 
bringing our guys in, the Gucci guerrillas from London that were the 
exiles that we propped up and put them over, and in positions of 
authority, and they are rejected by the Iraqi people."