Zinni CDI Remarks, part 2, Question and Answer session: cdi.org
[ Watch for WH smear campaign standin David Horowitz trying to pin Zinni to Kerry ]
BRUCE BLAIR: That was a stunning tour de force and a compelling blueprint. Thank you very much. We’re grateful for your presentation. And, we’ll start with Seth. It’s our tradition. Seth?
SETH GLICKENHAUS: You were presenting an extremely persuasive and convincing plan for how to do something constructive. From this point on in Iraq, is there any possibility that your plan, or some slight modification of it, could be presented to President Bush very seriously by you and possibly some other prestigious associates you have? And is there any possibility that this would be adopted?
GENERAL ANTHONY ZINNI: Well, I want to be clear. I don’t have a plan. I have some ideas or thoughts in each of the areas: political, economic, security. This is… I gave you sort of the Whitman’s Sampler of a few ideas. I don’t think…the worst thing we could do is create another U.S. plan. There are a lot of good ideas out there. Some ideas I hear, I hear from people in the region that are friends, I hear from people back here.
I think it’s time to take the U.S. imprimatur off of this idea…off of this and bring people together, Americans too, with ideas, but especially others and especially from the region, to get engaged in some sort of formal consultation process to say, let’s sit down together and let’s…these are some thoughts or ideas. A few that I’ve expressed here and I have some others. But, again, it’s not a plan. It’s a set of ideas. And some may work, some may not. They will have some. But, to go in to this country and say, here is a collection of ideas that we can mold into a plan that has been developed by the international community, and especially by people in the region that know the culture and know the situation and have had to live with it. I think is much more powerful than somebody back here coming with a plan or us walking out there with something else that automatically - when we lay it down - is going to be questioned.
Look, the plan for the future of Iraq has to be done by Iraqis, by people in the region and by the international community not just handed to them by Americans.
I found out from a friend of mine who is in the CPA, that there are members of the CPA running around Iraq now giving lectures on Jefferson.
Now, I like Thomas Jefferson. I’m a Virginian. But, he’s another dead white guy out there, you know. And, we could be doing more useful things, I think, than that, with the people out there.
And, soliciting from them the ideas. You know, it’s like the idea of how can we best create jobs? How can we best provide security for your business? If you’re a construction company owner in a place that you could potentially expand your business. You need to…
(Break in continuity of tape)
I’m in the position to …in Virginia, catching fish (laughter)…I’m not too popular up here. I only come up when Bruce asks me to come.
(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE): I think things may have reached the point even with the president and his advisors, where they might be more receptive to a program, beginning where you want to begin, with the U.N.’s full cooperation…I think it’s more…
ZINNI: What I’m offering is not a plan or a program. It’s some idea to throw on the table. But the idea is to bring people together to develop these things more fully and to add their ideas to this. Especially people who know what they’re talking about, that know the region, know the area, or have a vested interest in the outcome.
BLAIR: I have a feeling I’m going to be told to undertake a new project tomorrow morning, to pull this together, with you and others.
PHIL COYLE: Gen. Zinni, I think the administration claims 38 countries are in the coalition.
ZINNI: Yeah. Fiji, I think, was a big contributor. (Laughter)
COYLE: ...The president began to recite them in his last State of Union message. Why is their 38 countries not international, and your 26, or whatever you said you had, were. What’s the difference?
ZINNI: First of all, there’s a term that Rich (Eric) Shinseki that when you are in these operations, you got swimmers and non-swimmers. And you’d like to have a hell of a lot more swimmers than non-swimmers. Just being able to tick off a list of countries - some of which that most of us without a globe or a map would have difficulty locating - how many real swimmers are there out there?
Secondly, in those countries that have committed forces, how did their people feel about their forces being there? I’m getting calls from media and others in countries that are very close allies to us where the governments that have made a commitment. That commitment on the street isn’t anywhere near as strong. As a matter of fact, the other way (is true). I think a U.N. resolution makes it different. It’s not a U.S. war. It is a U.N. war. I think a U.N. resolution gets you more swimmers in the long run. That’s not to say the non-swimmers don’t have a place. Everybody can contribute. There is a way you can do it militarily or otherwise. Everybody can have a place. And what counts, in one sense, is the flags. But what counts is those flags being done in a way where they feel they have a say and it’s under international authority. So I go back to the swimmer/non-swimmer issue. I go back to the willing to burden-share. I go back to the point of when I go to my people, I say I’m not doing this for the United States. I’m doing this because, as a member of the United Nations, we committed as a body to this effort. That, I think that helps you in picking up some of the burden and sending some of the swimmers that we might need.
THERESA HITCHENS: I just want to ask a very simple question. I’m Theresa Hitchens. I’m the vice president of CDI. And I’m not a Middle East expert. I’m not an Iraq expert. I deal with other issues. But, from looking at this from the outside, I have a nine-year-old son…(unintelligible) I want to know why you think that at this point we can convince the U.N. and other people to get involved in this, when it’s going so horrifically badly? And when I have to turn down the newspaper everyday, I can’t let my son look at it. I’ll have to take it away to make sure he only sees the portion about the cicadas invading Washington, and not about beheadings. Why do you think that we, at this point of the game, where we are, which I think is the losing point of the game, would be able to get the kind of international support that we might have been able to get in a beginning stage? I agree with you, we could have done it and could have done it right. But, why, how do we do that now?
ZINNI: Because it’s in nobody’s interest to see Iraq turn into a chaotic state, a pit, a failed state, a sanctuary for extremism. I think everybody knows the outcome of that. It is in nobody’s interest to have Iraq, with all its resources to be a non-productive state. It is especially in nobody’s interest in that region to have Iraq as a failed, chaotic state on their borders. I don’t think the Europeans, French, German, Brits or others, want this to fail. The idea that “let’s not touch it and let it go completely to hell.” I don’t think that there is a country in the world that would accept that as an outcome. And if the only way to now treat this is through the international cooperation, which I think is in their interest to do it, with legitimacy of a U.N. resolution, with at least a commitment for their participation in the decision making, you can get that kind of commitment and it will go much easier on their streets to sell it to their people to do it. And I think that from the beginning, that would have been true. And I don’t think anybody wants to see us fail, because if we fail, the ramifications for them are great, no matter who they are, Europeans, Middle-Easterners, whoever.
LARRY KORB: General, Larry Korb. Under Goldwater-Nickles, the military are supposed to be able to talk to the president and the Congress, to tell them that. You’re quite right to talk about Gen. Shinseki. Where were the other chiefs when this planning for the war with all the optimistic scenarios were going? Don’t you think if they all have spoken out, it would have been harder for the administration to just push it along?
ZINNI: First of all, I’m not going to speak for the chiefs. And, I’m not going to speak against them in any way. I will tell you this. When I was a commander at U.S. Central Command, and Hugh Shelton was the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hugh Shelton sent us the book Dereliction of Duty. He required all of us 17 four-star General Commanders to read the book. And we all reported to Washington, I believe it was (the) 28th of January, 1998, for a breakfast meeting.
At that meeting was a then young Army Maj. McMaster who wrote the book. Dereliction of Duty describes the dereliction on the part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, who had strong feelings about all the mistakes that were being made, but didn’t speak their minds, and didn’t speak up, with the exception of former Commandant of the Marine Corps, David Shoup. The message to us, after we heard this, from Hugh Shelton is, that will never happen here. And the message to us from Secretary Cohen at that time, too, is that door is always open, and your obligation to the Congress, which is an obligation to the American people to tell them what you think, still stands strong. And that’s the expectation that we have.
They did not ever want to hear that we had a problem, something sticking our crawl, that we didn’t bring up to them, and we didn’t honestly express if we felt it had to be expressed. I can tell you there were times when I disagreed with the policy and I can tell you one time in particular that I was taken, personally, to a principals meeting, because the secretary and the chairman wanted to be sure that my views, which were different, were heard by the President.
Now, I think there is an obligation to speak the truth that when you’re confirmed, and when you raise your right hand in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and in front of whoever the administers that oath for your appointment. You answer to those many bosses. One is the secretary of defense and the president, another boss is the Congress, who represents the people. And you’re going to have to speak the truth, like (Eric) Rich Shinseki did. It’s painful at times. Believe me. I’ve been down that road. But it is an obligation that comes with the uniform. And I think if there are those, and I don’t know this one way or another, I don’t ask, if there are those wearing that uniform that have concerns and doubts about this or objections, and didn’t voice it, there is going to be a second edition of Dereliction of Duty down the road.
BOB JAMES: Secretary Powell had four, six months to try to sell the coalition to the U.N., apparently he was unable to do this….was the…
ZINNI: Well, you saw it differently than I did, because I saw him go to the U.N. and get a 15-and-0 vote for 1441, the resolution.
BOB JAMES: That’s right.
ZINNI: And we put the inspectors in. And the U.N. asked for the inspectors to play out their role. And in my mind in the way of thinking and looking at past history, that was maybe a six, nine-month, maybe even a year of process of the inspectors in there poking around.
I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw a diplomatic effort in New York, headed by the Secretary of State. That, in mind, the timeline was six, nine, twelve months. I saw a “go-to-war” timeline by (the) Secretary of Defense. He was going to war in March. If you know anything about military, you watch those deployments. That wasn’t deployment of forces in support of diplomacy. That was deployment of forces to go to war. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the heat of summer and we got to go or it’s too hot. The only people that exercise in the Gulf in the summer are Americans, you know (laughter). No Arab in his right mind is going to in the desert.
But I saw two different timelines. And if you’re going to pursue diplomacy…I heard a Congressman say the other day: “We tried it for seven months. What do you want?” Try it for 14. What was the rush, you know? I mean, I’ll go back to the point I made before. The painstaking approach that Bush 41 and others took to get the U.N. resolution first, to take the pains to build the coalition -- if you were to ask any military person to look at that coalition that General Schwarzkopf had built, a dual chain of command, not unity of command. Prince Khaled over certain forces, Arabic, Islamic forces. General Schwarzkopf over the other forces. The relationships within there are very tricky, and not all the same. I mean a Rue-Goldberg military wire diagram. But it worked. They made it work. And what was more important is they were together in this effort. And it takes time. The only time, the only reason you would do away with time is if the imminence of the threat was such that you couldn’t do that. But again, tell me were that threat, was that imminent? Where Saddam posed the threat to us that we couldn’t wait six more months, nine more months, even a year, for Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei to play it out?
Their predecessors all finally threw up their hands and said, “Non-compliance, non-cooperation, not full disclosure,” and made that report to the U.N. Security Council. And the U.N. Security Council provided the authorization after that. That’s been the track record. Why did we think it’d be otherwise now? Especially after Secretary Powell gets a unanimous 15-and-0 vote on the first resolution…
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Could you explain to me what happened to the Kurds after the first (Gulf) War?
ZINNI: Yes. I was involved with the Kurds. The Kurds believed that they had a moment. And they rebelled against Saddam. Saddam brutally crushed them. I think the Kurdish fighters, the Peshmerga, which in Kurdish means “those who face death”, were far better troops man-for-man, but the attack helicopters and the artillery in the air that Saddam used really brutalized them.
They were chased into the hills on the borders with Turkey. Turkey would not let them down out of the hills. This was winter time. They also went on to the Iranian side, too. In the part that we helped provide relief for the 10,000 that had died in the hills. We had over 500,000 Kurds stranded in those hills.
So we made the ultimate decision to bring them down and go back home. And we issued an ultimatum to Saddam that all his forces had to withdraw from that region. We outlined a security zone, which basically was generally along the lines of the Kurdish area, and we pushed Saddam’s forces out. We returned the Kurds to that area. We patrolled that area with air patrols. And we kept forces out there for a while, ground forces, but with a clear commitment they would re-enter if Saddam came back.
So, in effect, from 1991 up until the Gulf war, the Kurds had autonomy. Basically they were free and they were living under a security zone that we guaranteed and underwrote the protection for. And it lived that way. That’s a short version.
RACHEL FREEDMAN: Thank you. We’re consistently hearing what’s going wrong in Iraq. In your opinion, is anything going right?
ZINNI: Well, I’m sure that you’re going to find anecdotal evidence of good news stories out there. And, I agree to a certain extent, much of that doesn’t make news. You probably have a lot of efforts at the local level, where schools are rehabilitated, where local village councils are functioning and cooperating with US forces, where local little market economies are starting to move.
But, it’s a matter of relevant news, good versus bad. Is the good news, of which I’m sure there’s a lot of, sufficient enough to say you’ve tipped it in the right direction, versus the bad news?
On the bad side, I see an insurgency that is about in its mid-life. You know what happens, this is a classic Maoist insurgency. It’s not uniquely Islamist, it’s classically Maoist. You begin by disabling the infrastructure; frightening the people; attacking the outside interveners; attacking those that cooperate with them. Show them that the local authorities are ineffective. You do this by a series of violent acts, terrorist activities. We saw this in Vietnam. You saw it in classic insurgencies.
You then move to convince people that the government is powerless and corrupt; that the outside intervention forces are there as powers to dominate colonial powers. And you try to make the case that you are the only viable representative they have. And eventually you move that to civil war. Unless the insurgency completes itself and succeeds, you’ll move it to civil war.
The civil war will be between whoever, ethnic groups, more likely between those that support the good news, the change, the cooperation with the U.S. or whoever, and those that now reject it, that side with the other side.
When I was in Vietnam, my first tour of duty, I was an advisor with the Vietnamese Marines. So, I went to Vietnamese language school. And, I lived, I wore the uniform of the Vietnamese Marines and we lived in the villages. They had a quartering act. And I remember one time I was in the house of a family in northern part of South Vietnam and after dinner, the mother of the house said, “Do you have any pictures of your family?” And I showed them to her in her house. And she said, “Why are you here?”
And I said, “Oh, we’re here to…you, know, democracy, Jeffersonian democracy, free market economy, you’ll lead a great life.”
She said, “You want me to lead a great life?” She said, “Change things there.” And she pointed South.
I said, “You mean there, Hanoi”
She said, “No, I mean there, south.”
She said, “We’re stuck in between. They didn’t give us a good option. Are we supposed to die for that parade of Generals in Saigon, big men, little men, all the parade of generals that come through there that are corrupt? We’re stuck in between. A pox on both your houses. “
Does civil society have a voice? Civil society gets caught in between. And eventually the insurgents just try to make so that they’re better off with the insurgents. It’s at least the devil they know to stop the fighting. That’s what they would like to create here.
And the classic way you counter this is you have to better the environment. You have to make them want to fight for something. You have to protect them – populous and resources control, improve the environment, fight the guerrilla. These are the rules of insurgency that we all were brought up on.
And it fits here. This is an insurgency now. It has moved beyond terrorist actions, well into an insurgency. And it can get to the point of civil war: Shia on Shia, Sunni on Shia, any combination. Those that support U.S. reform and change, those that don’t, theocratic state supporters against those that want a democracy, whatever.
BLAIR: OK, one more…two more. David and Phil, then we should probably wrap it up. David Horowitz.
DAVID HOROWITZ: If your various policy suggestion are not adopted, and we continue down the same road, would you be willing to campaign against Bush, because that would be only change that could make a difference.
ZINNI: Well, I’m not interested in any political position. I mean…I don’t mean position for myself or taking a position.
HOROWITZ: Speaking in support of Kerry, I’d say.
ZINNI: I’m not interested in endorsing any political.
HOROWITZ: No, but would you make these points that you’ve made?
ZINNI: I’ve made these points. I made them on the record tonight. I’m not campaigning against of for anybody though.
HOROWITZ: Will you…
ZINNI: No. N. O.
DAVID HOROWITZ: Will you remain as an active spokesman?
Zinni: Look the reason…Let me say something personally here, and I mean this. This was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
Because when I spoke out on this, at the beginning, I was part of this administration. They entrusted me with the Middle East peace process, which I thought…And they did it in a way, that they fully gave me the trust, not a lot of guidance or direction, to let me to be able to do what I needed to do.
And I was very supportive of this administration. Certainly Secretary Powell and those in the State Department that I respect tremendously. It was not my desire to see this administration fail. If anything, I had an allegiance and I think, owed them something for the trust they gave me.
When this started to come about and I realized that it was wrong. I realized that if I speak out, I lose either way. If I’m wrong, you know, another guy who couldn’t figure it out. If I’m right, it means we have casualties, lost treasure and our image around the world is destroyed.
It was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. And so it was very painful to go down this road. I did not want to be right. I also knew by not being right, that was going to be painful too. But, it had to be said, because I can’t stand looking at the end of another news story and seeing the faces of those young kids.
My son is a Marine Officer in the infantry. I lost a member of my family in Iraq, the son of my cousin, already. So, it’s become very personal. Not to mention, just every one of those faces I see, I recognize. I mean, not directly, but these are, I mean, knew those sergeants and corporals and PFCs after 40 years, that paid a price for this, you know?
BLAIR: Phil Straus?
PHIL STRAUS: Phil Straus. An historical question…“Vietnam”…“quagmire” – those words, that we’re not supposed to say. What have we learned? What have we not learned? I’m particularly interested in issues around insurgency and media exposure and control of media and anything else you feel is important.
ZINNI: I think there are important lessons from Vietnam, that should have been applied here. I’m hesitant to start comparing Iraq with Vietnam. Because those that don’t want that comparison can certainly make a case for the differences. But, there are some strategic policy lessons, that we should have learned that time, that we should have thought through here.
Let me give you the first one. Make sure the strategy is right. You know, one of the things I said, flawed strategy. When the president gets to commit to this, all wars are political. I heard President Bush say in that Russert interview, “Well, Vietnam was a political war. “
All wars are political. This one is more political than Vietnam, I would argue. But, if you’re committing to this, what is the strategic objective? How will that be achieved? How will that meet our interests? What will be the cost of achieving that strategic objective?
You see, one of the problems we have is the only people who think strategically are the military. Because we happen to go to school to think that way. The frustration when you become a general is you walk in expecting strategic thinking and you don’t get it from the civilian side. Because they don’t go to the schools and they don’t think that way. They don’t think through the strategic center of gravity and how you affect it.
Let me give you an example – the War on Terrorism. I think we do a masterful job at the tactical level. We attack al Qaeda on the ground. We break down the finances. We break down the cells. We get law enforcement cooperation around the world doing wonderful damage to the organization. Yet, as an ideology and a movement, it has grown.
If I were to analyze, from a strategic point of view, al Qaeda - and, I’m not saying this is the right analogy, but it’s just an example - the strategic center of gravity for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden is a pool of angry, young men willing to die. What causes angry young men willing to die?
They’re willing to die because there’s a political, economic or social reason. Some sense of disenfranchisement. Some sense of oppression that makes them angry, fires them up, and makes them tempted to come to al Qaeda. Now, that isn’t enough to get them to blow themselves up and to do horrific acts. You need a rationale. You need something that justifies what they do.
At the operational level, the center of gravity is the aberrant form of Islam that they’re able to use on them to provide the sense of reward, and rationale and justification for what the do. And then the set of tactics that work so well against us, because it is asymmetric.
If you think about it on those three levels, I have to go after this “War on Terrorism,” which is even a bad name. I have to go after this movement of extremism at three levels. How do I cut that flow of angry young men? How do I make sure that aberrant form of Islam is rejected? Or encourage others to, and I’ve got some thoughts on all this, but I won’t go into it here. And do the things that we do well at the tactical level. But, you don’t have that kind of strategic thinking
The second point about strategy is, we always underestimate the American people. We never sell the go to war on the strategic…on the strategy. It’s interesting in that when Tom Ricks did the article on the Secretary Wolfowitz and myself - in this, the (Washington) Post - there was a comment in there by Secretary Wolfowitz that said, “Sometimes the American people have to be pushed into these things.”
That made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What do you mean, pushed? Does it mean cook the books on the intelligence? We shade the truth? Does it mean we don’t give them the straight answer as to why we’re doing this?
Sell it to the American people on the merits of the strategic advantages for doing this.
You know, if you have a strategy, and you believe in it, and you believe it’s the right strategy. Sell it on its merits to the American people. Make them think strategically and accept it or not. Don’t sell it on a Gulf of Tonkin or a WMD imminent threat because in the end, that’s going to come back and get you. That’s a lesson from Vietnam.
The next thing you have to understand about these situations is you’re not going to succeed unless the people on the ground you’re trying to help have a vested interest in succeeding. They’ve got to own the problem. Right now the United States of America owns the problem in Iraq. Nobody else owns the problem. We own the problem. The Iraqis have to own this problem. When I see a truck driver from West Virginia in a fuel truck, I say the Iraqis don’t own the problem yet. If I saw an Iraqi driver in that truck, they own the problem.
If I see an Iraqi soldier on the street standing up, if I see an Iraqi making some political decisions, then I say, they own the problem.
Let me give you a small example.
When went through that, you know, “Weekend at Bernie’s” session with the sons of Saddam. After we got those two guys, I would’ve turned those bodies over to the Governing Council. Immediately.
And I would’ve said to the Governing Council, “You own them.” You can bury them according to Muslim tradition within 24 hours. You can show them on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. You can bury them and tell the people you verified who they are. They’re yours.
What did we do? We kept the bodies. We violated Muslim traditional burial. We showed them out to the world. We owned the problem and that was a small problem that could’ve been put, on their back, to begin kind of transferring that monkey. We don’t do enough of that in this business.
You know, we don’t look at the opportunities. We have to make sure they have a vested interest in success. That they don’t look at this as a “pox on both their houses” or “I’m gonna wait this one out to see who wins.”
You don’t want them to be in that position. That’s the first lesson of insurgency that you have to deal with. There are many more, but we don’t have time tonight.
Thank you. |
