Minister Al-X

Anthony Zinni For U.S. Senate (Pennsylvania) Part Two

note- I published all three of these at the same time, but I don't know how 2 and 3 got switched in order- my bad
Also, all of this post is from GLOBAL VIEWPOINT's interview of Anthony Zinni
Don't think those anti-war liberals could support a military guy? Hmm. What did Zinni say about the threat that Iraq posed to us and about the Bush Administration's plan?
Zinni tried to warn the U.S. public and the Congress, but nobody, including John Kerry, would listen.

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 institutional memory had lapsed completely.

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 that there was no plan. The current government was way underestimating what they were getting into. That they had done virtually no planning.

Why didn't they do it? 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.

This whole war was big mistake on our part that has produced an unneeded bag of worms. It was elective surgery that didn't need to be done.

GV: Why not just get out?

Zinni: The time has not yet come -- 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 all 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 U.N. resolution, going back to that model the first President Bush put in place after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 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.

Remind me- what was Kerry's position before the war? "I thought they were a threat" Kerry was, and still is, either an idiot or an asshole, but either way Zinni won't have any problems fielding questions about the leadup to the war. And while we're on the subject of Kerry's stupidity, why the hell didn't I see a commercial with Zinni talking about the parallels betwewwn Vietnam and Iraq?

Zinni: Some of the strategic mistakes are very similar. First of all, in Vietnam we went in with a flawed strategy. Remember, the strategy was that 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 comparison is trying to draw the American people into support of the war 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 while they were innocently in international waters, when they weren't. They were in North Vietnam territorial waters supporting an ongoing operation. And here we have had 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.

Zinni also gets bonus points because the right-wingers are scared stiff of running against this guy in PA. And why shouldn't they be- Zinni is going to put Santorum over his lap and spank him like the immature baby he is.

posted by Anonymous @ 1:27 AM