Americans `conned' into backing war, ex-general asserts

Chicago Tribune ^ | Dec. 31, 2003 | Thomas Ricks

[Rennes Templar]

Former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni denounces `ideologues' in Bush administration

Anthony 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."

[Rennes Templar]

Please try submitting your post to some newspapers for publishing. Excellent commentary and analysis.

[Flightdeck]

'Rumsfeld did not care about mass graves when he openly supported Hussein while Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians and Kurds."

Wrong again, my misinformed friend. The minute Halabjah happened, the US and Rumsfeld condemned Hussein and cut off all support. That doesn't really fit with the liberal version of events, however.

"So, no WMD's"

I just told you the component chemicals of Sarin were found in illegal silkworm missiles. I just told you of Iraqi scientists driving uranium across the Syrian border. Guess what else was on the barge to Libya: uranium enrichment equipment. I suppose the gas masks and atropine injectors found at every Iraqi defensive site were for fun. I'm scared if we don't find the stuff not because of stupid political motivations that drive all democrats, but because everybody KNOWS they were there, even your friend Billy boy Clinton, so they might still be used. If you don't think they had WMD's in Iraq, go take a sip out of the Rhine river. It tested positive for Sarin and Mustard. There's your WMD.

[Stultis]

Whatever, General. Better a "quagmire," that we are steadily "slogging" our way through -- killing islamonazis (and secular arabists thugs) in the process, and with prospect of arresting the here-to-fore enexorable and steady slide of the entire Middle East into deadly chaos -- than another unresolved cluster#*@( like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.

[faithincowboys]

I understand that you want to duck the questions about your hero, and I'll draw the appropriate conclusions to that evasion.

By the way, I never said I was a military hero, but I do confess to being a bit of a hero worshipper. I love reading about MacArthur and Ike and Patton. And I can tell you with great confidence that Clark and Zinni aren't fit to shine their shoes.

I am a bit disappointed that a guy like you, sitting at a desk in Qatar, is unable to look Zinni's obvious duplicity in the face.

I am a little disheartened to see that you process uncritically those (who happen to be profoundly compromised)who discredit the mission, but are dubious about a well documented case discrediting the man making the charges.

I do think we are in for trouble if the people at the desks have such little faith in the mission and are biased in favor of those who want to thwart our mission.

By the way, I have no GI Jane illusions, but if I were younger enlisting would be more feasible.

I am also very uncomfortable with your belief that I need to have a star or something to comment on Zinni. I merely used Zinni's old words and actions to discredit him. If you were inclined to defend your mission and honestly appraise facts maybe you would have come to the same conclusions I have.

[okie01]

For the benefit of the benighted BDavis -- now, apparently, consigned to ZOTland -- I shall summarize his position on Saddam Hussein, as I understand it:

1. Saddam Hussein was not a "terrorist leader".

2. Nor was Saddam a supporter of terrorism.

3. Nor was he a harborer of terrorists.

Indeed, in BDavis' worldview, poor Saddam might be best characterized as an "innocent bystander". Something like "road kill", crushed by the evil Neocon SUV operated by George W. Bush (with Dick Cheney as the back-seat driver).

Presumably, he would feel the same about Yassir Arafat -- though I didn't get a chance to pose that question to him.

[TrueBeliever9]

Zinni AGAIN!

[okie01]

"If you don't think they had WMD's in Iraq, go take a sip out of the Rhine river. It tested positive for Sarin and Mustard. There's your WMD."

That was the Euphrates River, I believe.

Ain't it funny how the libs argue that Saddam had no WMD? Yet, from 1998 thru the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, they were as convinced as anybody that he had them. And they were even more worried about their presence than conservatives -- to the point of using Saddam's WMD arsenal as a reason not to invade.

The anti-American left would be great entertainment. If they weren't so friggin' dangerous...

[Matchett-PI]

"Please try submitting your post to some newspapers for publishing. Excellent commentary and analysis." ~ Rennes Templar

I wish I could take credit for it, but I can't. (It was written by a DemocRAT, and I have never been a DemocRAT). It has already been published and posted on Free Republic :) -- notice the credits at the end:

"..We are fighting back. .." ~ P. A. MacKinnon 12/30/03 CSM
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1048402/posts

BTW! What happened to BDavis? I was just getting ready to respond to his post to me at #234 when it was removed!

He had said that he was going to hold his nose and vote for Bush, but that he had some concerns that a long-term commitment / presence in Iraq might tie up our military and make us vulnerable to dangers that might crop up in other parts of the world. I planned on trying to allay his fears by referring him to this little item, excerpted here:

The Fourth World War

For two years, the U.S. has pursued the culprits behind the 9/11 atrocities with a vengeance that has shocked and awed ally and enemy alike. But even the devastating attacks on the Afghan and Iraqi regimes don't illustrate the true scope of the campaign, DOUG SAUNDERS reports.

While everyone was preoccupied with the fireworks, Washington has quietly deployed thousands of agents in a secretive struggle that may last a lifetime

By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, September 6, 2003 - Page F6

If you happen to find yourself in Nouakchott, a dusty and rarely visited city of three million on the far western edge of the Sahara, you may be surprised to find an unlikely sort of character hanging around government buildings and better hotels.

These new strangers, whose ranks have been growing steadily in recent months, are a species of serious-looking American men who bear little resemblance to the oil explorers and motorcycle adventurers who until recently were this city's only foreign visitors.

These men, the first Americans in decades to pay any attention to this poor region, began to appear only in the past two years.

With their grim and purposeful presence, they bring a Graham Greene sort of mood to this very remote outpost, but instead of seersucker suits and Panama hats, they tend to wear floppy safari hats and sunglasses, the unofficial uniform of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces.

What are these quiet Americans doing in the capital of Mauritania, a nation that has never made the front pages and sits a continent and a half removed from the immediate interests of the United States?

And what are their colleagues in a dozen other far-flung regions doing, handing out money and guns and hard-won secrets to governments and warlords and military men in the southern islands of the Philippines, on the steppes of Uzbekistan, in the dense jungle between Venezuela and Brazil?

The guys in the sunglasses have a name for this not-so-secret campaign.

They call it World War Four, an unofficial title that is now used routinely by top officials and ground-level operatives in the U.S. military and the CIA.

It is a global war, one of the most expensive and complex in world history.

And it will mark its second anniversary this week, on Sept. 11.

The White House would rather it be known as the war on terrorism.

But in its strategies, political risk and secrecy, it is more like the Cold War, which the CIA types like to consider World War Three. Its central battles, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been traditional conflicts.

But while the public's attention was focused on those big, controversial and expensive campaigns, the United States was busy launching a broader war whose battlefields have spread quietly to two dozen countries.

Iraq also was a distraction in another way: It was a shocking and awesome display of conventional military might that is not at all typical of the stealth, spy craft, diplomacy and dirty tricks being employed in the wider war on terrorism.

Likewise, "although Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan understandably captured the imagination and attention of the press and public," said William Rosenau, a former senior policy adviser in the State Department, "large-scale military operations are arguably the smallest aspect of the counterterrorism campaign.

That campaign resembles an iceberg, with the military component at the top, visible above the water."

Below the surface are dozens of operations, some secret and some simply unnoticed, conducted by the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps and small, elite military squads.

They have been aided by changes to U.S. laws after Sept. 11 that allow Americans to do things once forbidden -- such as assassinating foreign figures.

And much of the war is being fought by foreign governments that are willing and able to do things Americans wouldn't or couldn't.

"We simply don't have the resources, or the inclination, to be everywhere the terrorists and their supporters are, so we have no choice but to co-operate with other countries and their security services," Mr. Rosenau said during a panel discussion in Washington last week.

In some cases, that co-operation has led the United States to endorse and enable activities that are deeply unsavoury, all in the name of stomping out terrorism.

"Counterterrorism is now 90 per cent law enforcement and intelligence," said Jonathan Stevenson, a senior strategist with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"Since Sept. 11, the only overt military actions have been the Predator [missile] strike in Yemen, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and I don't think there will be many more.

I think there's a much higher priority placed on law enforcement and intelligence now. It's not a traditional war."

Whether this is actually a world war, or a large-scale police action, or (as both critics and some supporters say) the gestation of a new American imperialism, there is no question that it has come to span the globe.

It has caused mammoth shifts in global allegiances, in the positioning of U.S. military bases and CIA stations, in the flow of aid dollars, soldiers and arms across distant borders, on a scale not seen since the Cold War began.

Over the summer, while the world's attention was focused on Iraq, the Pentagon was busily preparing to shift hundreds of thousands of soldiers to new real estate, in places most Westerners known little about, in preparation for a world war that could last decades.

"Everything is going to move everywhere," Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith said. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be."

On Sept. 11, 2001, the world looked much as it had in the 1950s, even though the Cold War had been over for a decade. Huge concentrations of American soldiers were based in Germany, in Japan's outlying islands, and in South Korea.

It was around this time that Eliot Cohen, a military strategist and historian, referred to "World War Four" in a Wall Street Journal article that caught the eye of many Washington officials.

James Woolsey, the former CIA director, began to use the phrase last year in speeches calling for a far wider sphere of covert activity.

The White House officially objected to the phrase as senseless, even offensive: The first two world wars had real enemies and real victories, and together killed 60 million soldiers and civilians. The Cold War wasn't a world war at all, but the avoidance of one.

And this new operation is a "war" against an improper noun, whose enemy was not a nation nor even an ideology but a strategy, and its death toll, including both its actual wars, remains in the thousands.

Still, it has caught on, both among the stern-faced guys on the ground and in Washington's hawkish policy circles. General Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, was in Addis Ababa this summer to announce that Africa's east coast had become a region of great strategic importance.

"We are in the midst of World War Four," he told his audience, before imploring them to arrest local Islamist leaders in exchange for $100-million in aid, "with an insidious web of international terrorists."

As well, the general and his colleagues are acting as though it's a world war, or at least a global operation on the scale of the Cold War. They are building a new kind of military, one that will be based in lonely places we've never heard of, and doing things we won't often hear about.

"As we pursue the global war on terrorism, we're going to have to go where the terrorists are," explained Gen. James Jones, head of the U.S. military's European Command. "And we're seeing some evidence, at least preliminary, that more and more of these large uncontrolled, ungoverned areas are going to be potential havens for that kind of activity."

So American soldiers and spooks are moving out of Germany and into Africa -- the east now, and soon into the western Sahara and the northern Mediterranean coast as well.

They are moving out of Japan and Korea and into Southeast Asia, which has the world's largest Muslim population and is believed to be the area at highest risk of al-Qaeda outbreaks.

This fall, large numbers of U.S. soldiers are expected to land in the southern Philippines, whose Muslim terrorists are accused of having links to al-Qaeda.

And the soldiers are also manning bases created in such central Asian republics as Uzbekistan for the Afghan war, and on the Black Sea in Bulgaria and Romania for the Iraq conflict, but now expected to become permanent.

And even farther afield will be hundreds of new outposts that Gen. Jones refers to as "warm bases," "lily pads" and "virtual bases" -- temporary, stealthy or secret operations mounted with the help of local regimes.

This has led the United States into some highly unlikely allegiances, which may or may not be directly related to the immediate threat of Osama bin Laden's circle.

For example, it is conducting stealth operations in South America -- in the "tri-border" jungle region between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and on Venezuela's exotic Margarita Island, both of which are home to large populations of Saudi Arabian expatriates.

It is not clear whether there are actual terrorists here, or simply people who have sent money to terrorists, or if accusations of terrorism are being used to support local conflicts and to attract U.S. aid.

"The downside," said Herman Cohen, former U.S. secretary of state for Africa, "is that you can take on the agenda of local leaders."

To understand the astonishing scope and morally swampy ground of this ever-expanding war, it is worth visiting three of its lesser-known outposts.

The unlikely winner: Djibouti

Even American generals have to search for it on a map. It is a tiny, barren speck of sand and lava rock on Africa's upper right-hand corner, a country with no tangible economy, no arable land, no tourism, no reason to matter to anyone other than its 640,000 inhabitants. [snip]

Click here to read more:

The Fourth World War - The Globe and Mail - Doug Saunders http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030906/TERROR06/TPComment/TopStories

also posted here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/977401/posts

[faithincowboys]

We have already been there for some time. Others probably know better, but we spent the last 10 years in Saudi Arabia did we not? That is a quarter of the forty years you say it would take.

And the alternative to engagement in the region is what? Capitualtion to terror and tyranny. I guarantee you, you're not ready to face the consequences of that.

[NeoCaveman]

Isn't this the guy that tried to get the Middle East talks going again (a couple of years ago), but failed miserably or am I thinking of someone else?

Same guy. I remember Arafat praising "General Zeeeeneee"

[faithincowboys]

But isn't that what would have happened if you had your way? We must own up to the consequences of our policies. You need to be honest with others and yourself, had you been listened to, Saddam would be in power. That is plain and no amount of obfuscation and mud in the water will change that.

[faithincowboys]

So Al Qaeda, specifically Bin Laden, didn't say until there is peace in Palestine there will be no peace in America? So Saddam's picture wasn't hung up on innumerable walls in Gaza? So Saddam's money didn't reward the families of suicide bombers?

So you believe that Saddam --who had embraced Islam in recent years and had contempt for America-- wouldn't help or harbor terrorists? Well, I am afraid you don't have any scruples if you believe that.

And if Saddam should be executed for his crimes against humanity than why were you so opposed to his ouster?

[Qatar-6]

Not in Qatar, that's just my handle

What's to refute about what you say about Zinni and desert Fox? Strikes took out 85% of designated targets in Desert Fox.

In the old days of the British empire such actions were called punitive expeditions

You've got some kind of twisted Idea that Zinni and Clinton were in Cahoots to thwart the impeachment

Strike packages were formed some time before. We've got target folders on everything worth hitting that we know about for the whole Middle East

It was the white house that ordered the strikes halted after the impeachment vote, not Zinni

What was he supposed to do? Refuse to do that?

You base you knowledge off broadcast news, magazine publications and internet sources. All of which have political agendas of some type

I base my knowledge on participation in both the planning process and the execution of operations for the past 13 years

Be as bitterly partisan as you like, but don't expect me to buy it.

We're working our asses off out there and I have a lot of faith in my mission and the people around me. I don't have much faith in OSD because I have seen firsthand the negative effects of their meddling

But don't worry, we'll get it done out there.

Small thanks to you and the rest of the airchair heros on this thread.

[Qatar-6]

Not in Qatar, that's just my handle

What's to refute about what you say about Zinni and desert Fox? Strikes took out 85% of designated targets in Desert Fox.

In the old days of the British empire such actions were called punitive expeditions

You've got some kind of twisted Idea that Zinni and Clinton were in Cahoots to thwart the impeachment

Strike packages were formed some time before. We've got target folders on everything worth hitting that we know about for the whole Middle East

It was the white house that ordered the strikes halted after the impeachment vote, not Zinni

What was he supposed to do? Refuse to do that?

You base you knowledge off broadcast news, magazine publications and internet sources. All of which have political agendas of some type

I base my knowledge on participation in both the planning process and the execution of operations for the past 13 years

Be as bitterly partisan as you like, but don't expect me to buy it.

We're working our asses off out there and I have a lot of faith in my mission and the people around me. I don't have much faith in OSD because I have seen firsthand the negative effects of their meddling

But don't worry, we'll get it done out there.

Small thanks to you and the rest of the airchair heros on this thread.

[Conservative til I die]

What does it matter if he's Italian?

[faithincowboys]

It doesn't. I am part Italian and hate to see a fellow guido put himself before the Country.

Even if it were true, which I have demonstrated that it is not, there is zero upside to him saying this. What does he want us to do? Retreat and impeach. I mean what purpose did his BS serve?

He is a terrible man and I'd like to know what his motives are.

[faithincowboys]

So what does Zinni want? If it's a con job, shouldn't we get the Hell out of there and begin impeachment proceedings.

By the way, Zinni said he bombed (verifiably so) 85% of Sadam's WMD. In four days? That sounds mighty hyped to me. By what measure did they verify it? Where's the other 15% they didn't take out? How did they know what to hit? Did Saddam reconstitute any or all of the 85% Zinni took out?

And if there were no WMD, thus no WMD targets, what in the heck did Zinni hit?

If Zinni was dubious about the existence of WMD, why did he bomb away and then peddle knowingly erroneous reports? Who was he trying to help? Why didn't the Pentagon folks resign or leak that the President (in the midst of impeachment) was striking a sovereign nation (free of WMD) without UN backing or consulation with the Congress. An operation that wasn't interested in any objective other than diverting attention from grand jury hearings.

I think that would have been a fine time to speak up or resign, but Zinni didn't. He was a "good soldier" and lied to the American people and the World community.

Your lack of interest in these matters reveal you as an incurious analyst of the first order. i would like to know the answers to these questions and the fact that you are indifferent is troubling.

And if using rhetoric and argument that would give life to the withdrawl under fire movement advances your mission in anyway, perhaps your mission is subversive and you are the con job Sir.

BTW, A Hell of a deceptive tag you got.