Zinni Appears on “60 Minutes,” and the Bad News for Bush Just Gets Worse

By Richard H. Curtiss

With each passing week, it seems, the news for President George W. Bush just gets worse. The revelations of abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison continue, and may become even more scandal-encrusted. A new book by Anthony Zinni, the retired four-star general who was commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command (Centcom), and thus in charge of all American troops in the Middle East, may provide more trouble for Bush. Zinni has leveled even more telling criticisms of “Bush’s war” since it turned so sour.

Zinni’s book, Battle Ready, was written in collaboration with best-selling author Tom Clancy. The timing could not be worse for Bush, particularly because of Zinni’s blunt critique of why Bush wanted to go to war. Zinni examines why Bush picked such a bad time go to war without United Nations support; why Bush thought the U.S. and Great Britain could virtually do it alone; and why Bush thought he didn’t need allies or much greater troop strength.

He finds virtually nothing commendable about Bush, who may be the least-prepared American president ever to go to war, or even consider it. In Battle Ready, Zinni writes, “In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption. I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning.”

According to Zinni, the Bush administration’s former special envoy to the Middle East, Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. In the months leading up to it, Zinni carried this message to Congress: “This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don’t feel it needs to be done now.”

Nor was he alone in his doubts about an invasion of Iraq. Others included former General and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki. Zinni describes it as a war the generals didn’t want—but the civilians in the Pentagon did.

“I can’t speak for all generals, certainly,” Zinni said. “But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him.

“Now, at the same time,” he continued, “we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al-Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at ‘cells’ in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let’s deal with this one at a time. Let’s deal with this threat from terrorism, from al-Qaeda.”

“I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly,”

As Centcom commander-in-chief, Zinni was responsible for developing a plan for the invasion of Iraq. Like his predecessors, he subscribed to the idea that one only enters into battle with overwhelming force, as did Secretary of State Colin Powell when he was in the military. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, thought the job could be done with hi-tech weapons and with fewer troops.

Other commanders had views similar to those of former Gen. Eric Shinseki. “We were talking about, you know, 300,000, in that neighborhood,” Zinni said, “I think it’s critical in the aftermath, if you’re going to go to resolve a conflict through the use of force, and then to rebuild the country. The first requirement is to freeze the situation, and to gain control of the security. To patrol the streets. To prevent the looting. To prevent the ‘revenge’ killings that might occur. To prevent bands or gangs or militias that might not have your best interests at heart from growing or developing.”

Rumsfeld since has acknowledged that he had not anticipated the level of violence that would continue in Iraq a year after the war began. “He should not have been surprised,” Zinni said. “You know, there were a number of people, before we even engaged in this conflict, who felt strongly that we were underestimating the problems and the scope of the problems we would have in there. Not just generals, but others—diplomats, those in the international community who understood the situation. Friends of ours in the region who were cautioning us to be careful out there. I think he should have known that.”

The Pentagon, Zinni said, relied on inflated intelligence information about weapons of mass destruction from Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi and others whose credibility was questionable. There was no viable plan or strategy in place for governing post-Saddam Iraq, Zinni added.

Zinni’s outspoken comments were made on the May 23 edition of “60 Minutes,” the most widely watched current affairs television program in the United States. It was a devastating indictment of George W. Bush, and its results were evident in the next national polls.

Zinni told “60 Minutes” that “Ambassador Paul Bremer is a great American who is serving his country, but he has made mistake after mistake.” He cited “disbanding the Iraqi army, and de-Ba’athifying down to a level where we removed people who were competent and didn’t have blood on their hands that you needed in the aftermath of reconstruction—alienating certain elements of that society.”

Pulling No Punches

Zinni pulled no punches. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly,” he said. “Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted and pushed it…even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility.

“But regardless of whose responsibility it is,” he added, “somebody has screwed up…Certainly those who foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.”

Zinni was referring to the Bush administration’s “neoconservative” policymakers, who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. These include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Zinni believes these are the ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq. “I think it’s the worst kept secret in Washington,” he said. “That is, everybody…I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do.

“I know what strategy they promoted,” Zinni continued. “And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and Secretary Rumsfeld to do. And I don’t believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, or diplomat in Washington who doesn’t know where it came from.”

In Zinni’s opinion, their strategy was to change the Middle East and bring it into the 21st century. “All this sounds very good, all very noble,” he said. “The trouble is, the way they saw to go about this is unilateral aggressive intervention by the United States—the take down of Iraq as a priority. And what we have become now in the United States, how we’re viewed in this region is not an entity that’s promising positive change. We are now being viewed as the modern crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world…

“I believe that they should accept responsibility for that,” Zinni stated. “If I were the commander of a military organization who delivered this kind of performance to the president, I certainly would tender my resignation. I certainly would expect to be gone.”

In another interview, with Chris Matthews of MSNBC’S “Hardball,” Zinni said, “We should have waited some months to get the inspectors to play out, as they had before. And why not wait? Why was the threat so urgent that we had to go to war in March and throw aside international participation?

Explained Zinni, “I believe the real reason was a misguided belief, a strategic belief that we were going to change the Middle East overnight and do it on the cheap, without doing the hard work of the peace process, and help encourage reform in a way that could be acceptable to this culture.

“I believe that in this part of the world a change is coming,” he continued. “I believe the change will come in a form that the Iraqis can accept…It will be in a way that they can decide on their own form of governance, their own economic systems. It will be more compatible with the rest of the world, the 21st century. It’s going to take time and hard work, help from us, and insistence that they execute the reform. But to try to do it in one stroke in an intervention like this is absolutely the wrong way.

“I believe we need to secure the borders, protect the road networks and the infrastructure. And you’ve got to put the troops on the ground to be able to do that,” the former Centcom commander argued. “I think there’s going to be suspicion on the street, and I think they suspect us, like all occupiers in the past, that we are only after oil and their resources. We have to overcome that suspicion, and it’s difficult. This was not something to get into that was a one-year project.”

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.