General Zinni on Sixty Minutes

Ed sends:

I'm a "traditional conservative".

A traditional conservative apparently oblivious to the 5,000 casualties we've
suffered in carrying out the worst strategic blunder in living memory.

"Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory.
To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing
Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the
government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States
and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region
that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its
maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the
defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence."

-- James Webb


CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Was Iraq a blunder?

GEN. ANTHONY ZINNI: Yes, in my view, it was a blunder. The president was not
served well with strategy, planning, and decisions made from there. I think
they misled him on what to expect— the rationale, the elements for the
strategy, to the situation on the ground. It wasn't going to be a
pie-in-the-sky welcome in the streets with flowers. Anyone who knew the region
and knew the country knew what this was not going to happen.

MATTHEWS: The sales pitch was that it was for democracy, or that scarier still,
there were weapons of mass destruction. Was the salespitch, either of them,
honest?


ZINNI: Neither one was. Bush 41 knew Baghdad was going to be a problem. That's
why we went through a course of sanctions. To believe that Saddam was an
imminent threat was a real stretch for us who saw the intelligence.

MATTHEWS: When [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld was on ‘Hardball' he
expressed that he wasn't expecting us to be viewed as occupiers. Anyone who
spends three seconds in a foreign country knows this could be the case. How
could they believe that Iraq would welcome us?
ZINNI: It is hard to believe. We're viewed as colonial power, especially when
we don't come in under a U.N. mandate that shows a international cooperation.
It plays into the hands of extremists who want to use it against us on the
streets of Baghdad.

I think we owe the American people the straight show. If you're doing this for
a strategic reason, you need to lay it out. We bought into the exiles and their
stories.

MATTHEWS: Why is that?


ZINNI: It's the desire to believe in it. They had a strategy. Except for those
of us who know the region and had experience out there, we knew this was a
disaster in the long run.

I think it's the fault of the planners at the Pentagon who were responsible for
the construction phase. They didn't understand the depth and complexity, and
dumped this problem onto the military. But there was enough of us who had
experience that expressed our worries and voiced our concerns.

I have tremendous respect for [Secretary of State] Colin Powell… I don't know
what went on in the inner workings of the admininstration. Colin was on the
right track on Resolution 1441 in the U.N. that would internationalize this…
why not wait for the inspections that would make it take a couple of months
longer?

MATTHEWS: Why did the president and the vice-president go together in this war
with Iraq?

ZINNI: The president was hit hard with 9/11 as we all were. He saw the need to
make sure there were no threats that would materialize. He thought, “If this
is a big threat as I'm being told, we need to do something about it.� I
believe he was misled.

MATTHEWS: If we were misled in terms of how easy it would be for us to go into
Iraq? Who should be accountable? [Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
Stephen] Cambone, [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas] Feith, [Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld?


ZINNI: Somebody ought to be held accountable. The president, the country, and
the troops weren't served well. Why not all of them?

MATTHEWS: What should we do with Iraq now?


ZINNI: Its going to take time, hardwork, help from us, and insistence, that
they execute the reform. To do it in one stroke in an intervention like this is
absolutely the wrong way.

We're trying to create something for Iraq it's never known. These people are
confused and don't understand where you're taking them.

There's suspicion on the streets that we're after oil and resources. This is
diffuclt. This is not a one-year project. I think we need to convince them
we're there for their futures. We have to create within them the willingness
and desire to reform government and their economic system. It's not going to
work with us paying it for them on the dole.

We need to secure borders, road networks, troops on the ground. It's not only
an issue of security. While you en-place security, that's the only way you get
economic and infrastructure reconstruction to develop. Or else insurgents will
blow it up every chance they get.