[Gimpy]

Americans `conned' into backing war, ex-general asserts.
Former Central Command chief, Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni denounces `ideologues' in Bush administration



By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post

December 31, 2003

Anthony 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."

Zinni believes 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 fears is drifting toward disaster.

"Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy," he said. "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 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 conducted four days of punishing air strikes against that country in 1998. He also served briefly as a special envoy to the Middle East, mainly as a favor to his old friend and comrade, Secretary of State Colin 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 would 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 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. He does not think the capture of Hussein is likely to make much difference.

"We've failed thus far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he said, "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, etc., are still screwed up."

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 Dick Cheney also was 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 Central Command.

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 claim baffling

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As Central Command chief, 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.

As he walked off the stage in Nashville, Zinni concluded 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."

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 said, sitting in a hotel lobby in Pentagon City. "Afghanistan was the right thing to do," he added, referring to the U.S. invasion there in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime and its allies in Al Qaeda.

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 said. "He had a deteriorated military. He wasn't a threat to the region."

Zinni's concern deepened at a Senate hearing in February, 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 air strikes 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."

So early in 1999, Zinni 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 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.

Replay of Vietnam

And the more he dwelled on that, 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.

Decades later, Vietnam remains a painful subject for him. He has visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington only once; seeing the names of fallen comrades was too much.

And 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 said. "Every situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels a familiar chill.

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 said.


Copyright ? 2003, Chicago Tribune