For Vietnam Vet and Four-Star
Marine General Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2003; Page C01
Anthony
C. 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." 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 now fears is drifting toward disaster.
It is one of the more unusual political journeys to come out of
the American experience with Iraq. Zinni still talks like an old-school
Marine -- a big-shouldered, weight-lifting, working-class Philadelphian
whose father emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region, and who is fond
of quoting the wisdom of his fictitious "Uncle Guido, the plumber." Yet
he finds himself in the unaccustomed role of rallying the antiwar
camp, attacking the policies of the president and commander in chief
whom he had endorsed in the 2000 election.
"Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning,
underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy," he says. "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 the 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
also conducted four days of punishing airstrikes against that country
in 1998. He even served briefly as a special envoy to the Middle
East, mainly as a favor to his old friend and comrade Secretary of
State Colin L. 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 will 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 D. 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. Nor does he think the capture
of Hussein is likely to make much difference, beyond boosting U.S.
troop morale and providing closure for his victims. "Since we've
failed thus far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he says, "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, et cetera,
are still screwed up."
'Where's the Threat?'
Anthony 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 Cheney was also 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
U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq.
"I think he ran on a moderate ticket, and that's my leaning -- I'm
kind of a Lugar-Hagel-Powell guy," he says, listing three Republicans
associated with centrist foreign policy positions.
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 certitude
bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, 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." Zinni's concern
deepened as Cheney pressed on that day at the Opryland Hotel. "Time
is not on our side," the vice president said. "The risks of inaction
are far greater than the risks of action."
Zinni's conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage that day was
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."
Unheeded Advice
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 says, sitting in a hotel lobby in Pentagon City,
wearing an open-necked blue shirt. Even at the age of 60, he remains
an avid weight-lifter and is still a solid, square-faced slab of
a man. "Afghanistan was the right thing to do," he adds, referring
to the U.S. invasion there in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime and
its allies in the al Qaeda terrorist organization.
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 says. "It was
a pain in the ass, but he was contained. He had a deteriorated military.
He wasn't a threat to the region."
But didn't his old friend Colin Powell also describe Hussein as
a threat? Zinni dismisses that. "He's trying to be the good soldier,
and I respect him for that." Zinni no longer does any work for the
State Department.
Zinni's concern deepened at a Senate hearing in February, just 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 airstrikes that 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," he recalls.
So early in 1999 he 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 in Tampa
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. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the
product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were
going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington
think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground."
And the more he dwelled on this, 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.
A Familiar Chill
Even now, decades later, Vietnam remains a painful subject for him. "I
only went to the Wall once, and it was very difficult," he says,
talking about his sole visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on
the Mall. "I was walking down past the names of my men," he recalls. "My
buddies, my troops -- just walking down that Wall was hard, and I
couldn't go back."
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 says. "Every
situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels the same chill. "It
feels the same. I hear the same things -- about [administration charges
about] not telling the good news, about cooking up a rationale for
getting into the war." 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 says. Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in
which the Johnson administration claimed that U.S. Navy ships had
been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The
Gulf of Tonkin and the case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in
my mind."
Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing
democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s
that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest
of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands.
And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies
as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came
from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow,
the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."
He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials
have taken responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat
posed by Iraq. "What I don't understand is that the bill of goods
the neocons sold him has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he
says. "Where is the accountability? I think some fairly senior people
at the Pentagon ought to go." Who? "That's up to the president."
Zinni has picked his shots carefully -- a speech here, a "Nightline" segment
or interview there. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities
were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage
and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said at a talk to hundreds
of Marine and Navy officers and others at a Crystal City hotel ballroom
in September. "I ask you, is it happening again?" The speech, part
of a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps
Association, received prolonged applause, with many officers standing.
Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response from
military people about the stance he has taken. "I was surprised by
the number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, 'You're speaking
for us. Keep on keeping on.' "
Even home in Williamsburg, he has been surprised at the reaction. "I
mean, I live in a very conservative Republican community, and people
were saying, 'You're right.'"
But Zinni vows that he has learned a lesson. Reminded that he endorsed
Bush in 2000, he says, "I'm not going to do anything political again
-- ever. I made that mistake one time."
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this article.
