Gen. Anthony Zinni is often mentioned by critics of the administration's Iraq War policies as having predicted many of the problems in this war publicly before the invasion began. And he deserves credit for that.
But his appearance on Meet the Press last week shows that he's about as clueless as our other infallible generals and the Bush officials on what to do now:
MR. RUSSERT: If you were the president of the United States right now, what would you do about Iraq?
GEN. ZINNI: Well, unfortunately, Iraq is - we can't let it fall apart. It is part of a whole myriad of issues that we have regarding stability in the Middle East. We’re committed to it now. We have to see this through. I think we have to get this government to form some sort of unity representative government. We keep pressuring them to do this. They keep avoiding the pressure, which I don't understand. We have to, obviously, make a decision on the militias. They seem to be part of the problem that we're not addressing. We’re, we're trying to develop a military and a police force that can handle this problem. I think one of the elements that's missing in this is building up the intelligence capability. (my emphasis)
"We have to ... make a decision on the militias". What does that mean? Why doesn't he just say what he thinks that decision should be? He sounds like the Vichy Democrats who go on TV and criticize their own party with "process" comments like, "the Democrats need to show that we're tough on national security...", instead of sounding "tough on national security" by the way they discuss issues.
It really seems to me that it's very late in the day in the Iraq War for experienced ex-military official like Zinni who expect to be taken seriously on policy issues to be talking this way. He continues:
You know, the, the number of insurgents, so-called insurgents, although it’s a mixed bag of problems that we face, could be dealt with if the people turned against them. If, like General Casey said a week or so ago, 99.9 percent of the people are opposed to the violence and the perpetrators of these violence. Well, all those people have to do is call up on the phone and tell you where the insurgents are, tell you in the two to four provinces that everybody said this is concentrated in where the issues are, where the problems are, where the people that are doing this are, and you wouldn't need much more than you have right now. And the security forces and the Iraqis would be able to handle it. We're not fighting the Waffen SS here. You know, we’re fighting a bunch of ragtag people with AK-47s and IEDs and RPGs. They can be policed up if the people turn against them. We haven’t won the hearts and mindsyet. (my emphasis)
Zinni is working from the same conventional-war perspective that has lead the Army to the current defeat in Iraq. "We're not fighting the Waffen SS here." Yeah. We're also not fighting a conventional war. The prevailing thinking among the officer corps, which Zinni reflects here, is that counterinsurgency is not "real" warfare. The real thing is fighting the Waffen-SS, or Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap.
The platitudes he's talking here are virtually unrelated to the current reality. He's talking about things like having a bunch of citizens inform on the insurgents to the government on their own initiative that would require a real government with some kind of support base among the population not dependent on factional allegiance. The government is Shi'a, and is increasingly doing what they've been doing all along: acting on behalf of the Shi'a side in a three-way civil war among Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds.
The (Shi'a) government, through "government" troops loyal to Shi'a political militias, is fighting (Sunni) insurgents. But Sunnis living in Sunni areas aren't going to inform on Sunni insurgents to the Shi'a government. The chance to provide enough security to set up a stable, genuinely national government with minimal bloodshed was probably lost forever the day in April 2003 the mass looting started in Baghdad, and the US troops stood by and protected only the Oil Ministry.
Zinni in this interview is talking the kind of script "TV generals" are expected to talk. But it's amazing that he's trying to pass this off as being serious about what to do in Iraq. For instance:
You know, they need amongst the population - this is classic insurgency — they need either fear, apathy or support, sympathy. If they get a combination of those three - and right now they have a combination. If there’s a viable government, there’s an opportunity for jobs, if there's a program that shows hope for the future for their children, they're going to turn against these people. We haven't given them that in three years.
He's talking as if we hadn't already been there in occupation for three years, and as though there were no widespread insurgency and no bloody sectarian civil war going on there. He even finds "good news"!
The - probably the good news in all this is the potential for Iraq to come out of this better off is there, where there was no hope under Saddam. But the problem is that we’ve wasted three years here. They may go, in the worst case, through a period that looks something like Lebanon did in the '80s. And it may take them a while - five, 10 years of this kind of violence and destructive behavior, sectarian violence that they perpetrate on each other, for them to get out of this. And I think we lost ground when we had an opportunity in the beginning to freeze this situation and gain control, and we let all these snakes come out.
Great. US troops stuck for 10 years in the middle of a Lebanon-type civil war. It's at least more honest than the drivel we hear from administration spokespeople and most of our serving infallible generals.
Zinni did have some good things to say in that interview. But I was struck by how much his thinking is stuck in the same mode that pervades the officer corps. A last example:
MR. RUSSERT: The president, the secretary of state, all said he was not contained, he was not in a box, that he was a madman.
GEN. ZINNI: Well, I think that's - that is an insult to the troops who, for 10 years, ran the containment: those brave pilots who flew the no-fly zones, those sailors who enforced the maritime intercept operations, our soldiers and Marines that were on the ground out there that responded to every crisis, our support for the efforts of the inspectors that were in there. (my emphasis)
Although Zinni himself sharply criticizes much of what has been done in the Iraq War, he reflexively fell back here on saying that anyone who criticized the policy he was defended at the moment were insulting "the troops".
