By reading the reactions of some bloggers, one might get the impression that the six retired generals criticizing Donald Rumsfeld got their orders from the Democratic National Committee. The responses distract from the arguments the generals advance, but don't address them. "They are, in a sense, Clinton appointees," BigLizards.com says of the six generals. "Zinni is the epitome both of an Old School general and a Clintonista." Douglas Hanson at The American Thinker labels Anthony Zinni "one of those leaders during the Clinton years of bread and circuses." JustBarkingMad calls the critics "Clinton's Generals." Linking such honorable men to such a dishonorable man is more apt to make Clinton look good than it is to make the generals look bad. It's also a flip way of avoiding the serious points that the military leaders raise.
The best counter seems to be Rumsfeld's: if every time a few of the thousands of generals disagreed with the Secretary it was cause for the Secretary's resignation, there would be a revolving door at the post.
Neverthless, if they're right (and I have no way of knowing if they are), if the troop levels fell short by half, that's a serious blunder. Would we be able to dominate the situation with a quarter million soldiers? If so, they should be there.
Are all the rest of the generals saying it's going great, or are they just keeping their mouths shut?
Ralph,
There are less than a few hundred generals. The ones that are now complaining were not the big decisionmakers, but they were in important, in-the-know positions. They would know if they had enough troops to do the job or not. Their dilemma is this: To stay on when the top decisionmakers are screwing up and try to work through the bad stuff or to quit when they disagree and run the risk that they may end up being the ones who are wrong. I have no doubt these guys think they are doing the right thing, but I have two questions for them. 1. Where were they 2 or 3 years ago when they could have had some impact on what happened if they had protested then? 2. Do they think they are helping the troops on the ground by coming out of the safety of retirement to rail against the way the war is being run? I will guarantee that those two questions are the ones that will make the retired generals uncomfortable.
Obi Juan,
You can bet that the rest are keeping their mouths shut.
By the way, the stupidest argument to make is that these guys were all in the bag for Clinton. They may have gotten their stars because they were connected, but it was connections they had within the military that got them there. And those connections usually go to guys who were good at what they did at the lower ranks.
Ralph,
There are less than a few hundred generals. The ones that are now complaining were not the big decisionmakers, but they were in important, in-the-know positions. They would know if they had enough troops to do the job or not. Their dilemma is this: To stay on when the top decisionmakers are screwing up and try to work through the bad stuff or to quit when they disagree and run the risk that they may end up being the ones who are wrong. I have no doubt these guys think they are doing the right thing, but I have two questions for them. 1. Where were they 2 or 3 years ago when they could have had some impact on what happened if they had protested then? 2. Do they think they are helping the troops on the ground by coming out of the safety of retirement to rail against the way the war is being run? I will guarantee that those two questions are the ones that will make the retired generals uncomfortable.
Obi Juan,
You can bet that the rest are keeping their mouths shut.
By the way, the stupidest argument to make is that these guys were all in the bag for Clinton. It's probably fair to say that they leaned toward Bush even before he was president. It's Rumsfeld that they don't like. They may have gotten their stars because they were connected, but it was connections they had within the military that got them there. And those connections usually go to guys who were good at what they did at the lower ranks.
Here's Zinni now regaring the preparations for the war in Iraq:
"What bothered me ... [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD."
Here's Zinni then speaking to Congress:
"Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region," adding, "Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions ... Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months."
Will the real Anthony Zinni please stand up!?! To borrow a phrase from the immortal Johnny Cochran: If the statments don't tie, one's got to be a lie!
Thom: Is not the word "probably" in the second statement consistent with the "no solid proof" language of the first? Maybe Johnny Cochran could have won a jury over with this, but mere mortals have trouble demonstrating a contradiction. It would have been nice had Rumsfeld qualified his pre-war statements, a la Zinni, with words like "probably." Instead, he spoke the language of certainty on WMD when he had no business doing so: "We know where they are." No you didn't.
Dan, my we're up late! I would respectfully (and you know I mean that!) disagree, as the "probably" seems to be in reference to the continuation of the nuclear research, while he firmly avers Saddam has retained his chemical and biolgical stockpiles.
And even Johnny would have trouble casting a shadow of reasonable doubt over the clear certitude of Zinni's last statement.
Best regards,
Thom
P.S. get some sleep!
As I read the two Zinni quotes, I see him first giving deference to the intelligence the President had given him. He had his own personal doubts, but the President had given him intelligence and it's not his place to question it. But later as we all found out, the intel was from questionable sources and cherry picked to produce a result. Zinni's personal suspicions were born out.
Didn’t the same thing happen with Colin Powell?
Late! I just get going around 11 p.m. or so! Einstein proved time is relative, and now we are doing it again. One man's late is another man's early.
Anyhow, of the generals/critics, Zinni is probably the weakest posterchild to hold up as some sort of flip-flopper (not that reversing positions, when events prove an idea disastrous, is anything to be ashamed of) since he was, I believe, the only one to be consistently against the Iraq war. I'd like to see the Zinni quote without the elipses and brackets, and in context, and probably then I'll understand what he said. But if his point was, as your quote of him suggests, that Hussein "probably" had WMD, I don't begrudge him. Lots of people thought that he might have them (Saddam had used them less than two decades prior). It wasn't an unreasonable proposition. Saying that you knew that he had them, and knew exactly where they were, is another matter entirely. And I think that's why so many people are angry with Rumsfeld and company, they feel that their country was either a victim of deception or extreme incompetence. Judging by the infiltration of his operation by a spy, the Abu Ghraib mess, the contention by his deputy that Iraq's oil would pay for the war, and the failure to kill or capture bin Laden, my sense is that it was probably incompetence.
Dan and Obi Juan, what bothers me about Zinni's current position is if he, as he says in his own words, "knew" the original intelligence to be wrong at the time, his statements before Congress MUST have been either inaccurate or knowingly misleading.
And if he "knew" the intelligence the Administration was providing was wrong, how did he know? What was his source? Dan, he couldn't have been basing his congressional testimony before Congress on the same faulty intelligence everyone else had if he "knew" it to be erroneous.
Lastly, in the military, there is one option open to any officer faced with a plan of action they know to be wrong, one that requires moral courage, commitment and belief in one's judgement: resignation. If Zinni was so convinced of the inaccuracy of the intelligence, why not resign and go public with the knowledge only he seemed to possess?
Had General Harold K. Johnson, Army Chief-of-Staff, had the guts to follow through with his commitment to this option on July 28, 1965 (he actually made it to the White House gates and had the 4 stars removed from his uniform before ordering his driver to turn around), who knows how history might have been changed?
To borrow a phrase from the Left, what did Zinni "know" and when did he "know" it?
Thom, based on reading the transcript of Zinni's interview on Meet the Press, I think the quote you cite could use a little context. Here's what Zinni said immediately after noting the "depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew":
"Now, I’d be the first to say we had to assume he had WMD left over that wasn’t accounted for: artillery rounds, chemical rounds, a SCUD missile or two. But these things, over time, degrade. These things did not present operational or strategic level threats at best. Plus, we were watching Saddam with an army that had caved in. It was nothing like the Gulf War army. It was a shell of its former self. We knew we could go through it quickly. We’d stripped away his air defenses. He was at our mercy. We had air superiority before we even—or actually air supremacy before we would even start an operation. So to say that this threat was imminent or grave and gathering, seemed like a great exaggeration to me."
In other words, when Zinni is discussing intelligence exaggerations, at least in this context, he's contrasting the actual threat to America that Iraq posed with the depicted threat to America that Iraq posed in the rhetoric of Bush and co. Clearly, that, and not WMD, is what he meant (because that's exactly what he said with regard to the depiction of intelligence not meshing with what he knew.
There is actually no contradiction is saying that our intelligence in Iraq was manipualted, hyped and exaggerated and saying that Iraq was in possession of WMD. For instance, Colin Powell, in his presentation to the United Nations did not mention Iraq's attempt to acquuire uranium from Africa, even though the President mentioned it just eight days earlier in his State of the Union Address. Colin Powell didn't bring up this charge because he found it to be baseless. As we now know the State Department was already circulating a memo stating the uranium documnets were forgeries. However, Colin Powell did mention other possible Iraqi involvment in biological and chemical weapons. So Powell was tacitly aware of an effort to manipulate intelligence before the war and still asserted that Iraq had WMD.
Besides it's absurd to expect those who opposed the war to prove a negative and say they knew Iraq didn't have WMD. No one could know this. But what we did know is that the Bush Administration was determined to go to war, even before 9/11, and that the "intelligence" was part of their campaign to generate a climate of fear to create a casus belli. Those who spread falsehoods because they were lied to are not equally as culpable as those who lie.
