America was "conned" into this war!

[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

[Gimpy]

Not a single comment or denial of these facts from the "right-headed" folks, huh?

I wonder why?

Cause General Zinni is RIGHT! THAT'S WHY!

[HARDCORE]

GIMPY et al -

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.

Political screw-ups, apparently, are not limited to party scope, ie: Johnson (D) and Bush (R). In the end, however, it's the guy with the rifle and backpack that usually pays for mistakes and/or lies! (opinion)



VERITAS

[MORTARDUDE]

Gimpy :

This is one of the best articles about the Iraq War I have seen. Why isn't he all over The Big News Media ???

Larry

[blues clues]

Larry it's not in the news becaues all the press and the big news media are a bunch of left wing liberal and will not print anything bad about the bushs.wait minute I'm a LEFT WING LIBERAL me thinks I should go take my med's and lie down for a while.
razz

[Gimpy]

I think RAZZ had the right answer if you'd just substitute "right-wing" media for his evaluation!

[SEATJERKER]

...for sake of debate,...

...

....Gimp, I think it was right to go in, and not just on the principle of oil, No matter what the past held while we we're soliticing "friends" back then, the truth in 2003 was that the asshole was killing people by the thousands at will, and it was right to go in there just to save thousands more, weather, or not they were "Iraqi" people, or not, they still are human beings, and no culture should have to be subjected to a ruler as ruthless as he was,...

...The man had to go down, period,...

... WMD's,... What was that Mig? that he didn't have, and what gets me is the "AMOUNT" of mortors these "civilians" seem to still have, is that a free nation to live in? the people were living in reckless abandon with no future in sight, or hope, and being slaughtered...

...just my .02,

[MORTARDUDE]

My .03c...the reasons we went in was oil and money plain and simple. There are millions of folks murdered all over the world every year, directly or indirectly by their own governments. Ever hear of Rwanda ? The rest of Africa..South America, Central America, Asia...The United Nations / NATO are the ones that should have been involved and not just us. You cannot intervene every time some dictator is killing his own people. Heck, we are the ones who put him there to begin with. The Big News Media is not left-wing or right-wing..IT IS JUST STUPID.

Larry

[SuperScout]

By golly, now why didn't I think of that, it was the oil, stupid!! I've noticed how gas prices around here have dropped to 37 cents per gallon, heating oil, which we don't use, but is being sold up in the accursed yankee land for 52 cents per gallon, and Cheney's personal financial portfolio has more than tripled since we went to Iraq and stole all their oil. *** Translation for the intellectually challenged: anybody who claims this to be true is surfeited with excrement.

Let's see now: not that I've ever met Gen. Zinni personally, but wasn't he the point man sent into the area to solve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute? Wasn't he tasked with setting up a series of meetings between the disputing factions, with US involvement and participation? And wasn't the purpose of these meetings designed to end the turmoil, bloodshed and chaos in the area? Was any of this accomplished? Wal, golly gee, even someone like Gimpy with their tinfoil helmet on too tight can divine that answer. Just a mere question, but if he can't accomplish that mission, are we to fall over in total swooning that he has all the answers about other areas in the Middle East? He just might, but then again............ And wasn't the general one of the loudest warning voices about the pending disaster of the "Arab streets" after we invaded Iraq? And did the Arab streets go and explode as he predicted? Hint to Gimpy: the answer is exactly like the answer to the previous question: NO.

Existing threat: during Gulf War I, did or did not Iraq fire missles into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Israel, with intent to harm of kill citizens thereof? Were any previously dispatched weapons inspectors able to positively verify that all these missles were destroyed, as required by UN mandate? Was or was not Saddam trying diligently to develop bio or chem type weapons to stick on the ends of his missiles? Do you have any reason to believe, that left unfettered, Saddam woundn't have used those missles against his enemies, real or imagined?

Now, after reading the above questions real slowly, praying for wisdom and counsel, rethink the original question about who was conning whom. It appears to me that the only con job is being perpetuated by misguided whiners, who can't get over Florida 2000, who have no viable candidate for the White House in 2004, and who have nothing but hate as their motivating impetus. I do pray for their enlightenment!

[blues clues]

super snout,like Larry said there is mass muders going on as I'm writting this so under bush all he had to do is say stop or else and if they don't we go to war with them I'm confused I alway though that the GOP was a loving party good for everyone, well I'll tell you if this is loving I'll go with Gimpy and his tinfoil helment move over Steve and pass the tinfoil if you don't mind.
razz