I suspect Zinni has a good deal more foreign affairs acumen than the authors of these various cheap shots aimed at him. Collin Powell, our current Sec State, and former Chairman JCS, is not the only military leader with a fairly thick foreign affairs section in his resume.
The remark about Pentagon planners' unfamiliarity with the contingency plan from 1999 is a bit startling; if true it suggests another truly FUBAR situation, with tragic potential for much unecessary spilling of GI blood.
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The military's silent takeover of U.S. diplomacy
By MARGO HAMMOND, Times Books Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 6, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/04/06/news_pf/Perspective/The_military_s_silent.shtml
For the past decade, the U.S. military has been the tail that wags the country's foreign policy dog, argues a recently published book by journalist Dana Priest. The title of the book is The Mission, but it might as well be The Mission Creep.
Fighting narcotics in Latin America. Keeping peace in the Balkans. Bringing aid to Africa and democracy to Iraq. Are these jobs for a soldier?
"U.S. leaders have been turning more and more to the military to solve problems that are often, at their root, political and economic," writes Priest, who covered the Pentagon for the Washington Post before taking an 18-month leave to write The Mission. Filling a vacuum left by "an indecisive White House, an atrophied State Department, and a distracted Congress," civilian authorities in the past decade have repeatedly called on U.S. armed forces to help manage world affairs.
The result? The top military brass -- particularly the commanders of the regional focused unified commands, or CinCs -- have grown more and more sophisticated in their international dealings while civilian decisionmakers have become less and less knowledgeable about their military.
"At a minimum, Americans should understand the consequences of substituting generals and Green Berets for diplomats, and 19-year-old paratroopers for police and aid workers on nationbuilding missions," writes Priest.
The latest resort to a military solution, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is, of course, a more traditional use of armed troops. But when the bombs stop falling over Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's regime is toppled, will the American military be again asked to step in and perform such nonmilitary tasks as the distribution of humanitarian aid and policing a war-torn and faction-ridden state? Will a military proconsul be asked to rule an occupied Iraq?
Will mission creep set in again?
Judging by the U.S. experience in the Balkans and Afghanistan, it's an inevitable -- and daunting -- likelihood.
"Although the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan was clear in purpose, we are now seeing that the hardest, longest, and most important work comes after the bombing stops, when rebuilding replaces destroying and consensus-building replaces precision strikes," explains Priest, whose book was published before U.S. and British troops began fighting in Iraq. "As the U.S. Army's experience in Kosovo shows, the mind-set, decisionmaking, and training of infantry soldiers rarely mixes well with the disorder inherent in civil society. The mismatch of culture and mission can distort the goal of rebuilding a country. In the hands of poorly formed, misguided troops, it can create disaster."
Priest's chronicles of those disasters -- the story of a GI's murder of an 11-year-old Serbian girl in Kosovo is particularly horrifying -- are not an indictment of military leadership, however. Quite the contrary. Her criticism is leveled against "civilian leaders in Congress, the White House, and the State Department" who have to develop a more nuanced foreign policy, and against Pentagon leaders who do not "fully consider the context" in which American troops are sent to operate.
According to Priest, diplomacy began giving way to military options in the 1970s and 198Os when Congress slashed the State Department's operations budget by 20 percent. Nearly a quarter of the department's employees were cut from the payroll. More than 30 embassies and consulates were closed. Meanwhile, as military budgets grew, military personnel stepped in to fill the diplomatic void. As post-Vietnam civilian leaders grew more isolated and less comfortable with the military world, their military counterparts learned how to operate in the civilian sphere. Each branch of the military, for example, has a Capitol Hill staff of its own, and while government agencies are not allowed by law to lobby Congress, they can assert enormous influence.
Even more influential are the regional "CinCs" (pronounced "sinks") who rule their fiefdoms like proconsuls to the Roman Empire. Priest profiles four of them, all now retired: Gen. Anthony Zinni, who headed up Central Command in Tampa before Tommy Franks; Gen. Wesley Clark, CinC of the U.S. European Command and SACEUR (NATO's Supreme Allied Commander) during the Kosovo war; Adm. Dennis Blair, CinC of the Pacific Command during the Indonesian militia violence in East Timor; and Gen. Charles Wilhelm, head of U.S. Southern Command whose main area of battle was the war on drugs.
In The Mission, these commanders-in-chief who lead the U.S. military's regionally focused unified commands come across as visionaries who "pushed, not always successfully" to make their government "live up to its responsibility to make the world a more peaceful place." The special operations forces (including the Army Green Berets and the Navy SEALs), the favorite tool of the CinCs when diplomacy has failed, are portrayed as superbly trained fighters whose dangerous missions are often undertaken "below the radar," as in Nigeria, where they were sent after Sept. 11 to train local Muslims, or in Afghanistan, where they grew beards to fight discreetly at the side of the Northern Alliance.
With a combined budget of $380-million a year, the CinCs and their institutions have far more resources than the civilian agencies that by law and tradition are supposed to manage U.S. foreign relations. Each CinC also has a huge staff (the smallest, dealing with Latin America, employs over 1,000), an around-the-clock intelligence center, a long-distance aircraft and a fleet of helicopters at his disposal, and an entourage of up to 35 officers and senior noncommissioned officers (by contrast only the secretary of state has his own aircraft and entourage; all other diplomats fly on regularly scheduled commercial airlines or hop military planes).
With all these resources at their disposal, the CinCs have developed a remarkably nuanced view of the world, far more nuanced than many of their civilian counterparts. In the earlier months of the Bush presidency, the worldwide influence of the CinCs, in fact, rankled some members of the administration, in particular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was hell bent on reducing their role abroad.
Then came Sept. 11. After terrorist planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress approved $375-billion in defense money, twice the increase the Pentagon had requested. Troops were sent to Afghanistan and into a murky war on terrorism involving an increased emphasis on intelligence gathering and clandestine operations.
Not that the turf wars between civilian and military leaders disappeared completely. Just last week, in response to the Pentagon's plans to oversee the distribution of aid in Iraq, a task traditionally controlled by civilians, Rumsfeld received a letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell stating that he wanted to retain control of the assistance programs. State Department officials are worried that distribution of aid by the military would fan the perception that Americans are an occupying force. They also fear that military involvement in aid distribution might discourage foreign governments and international aid agencies from participating.
Still, as the ambiguous war on terrorism continues and without the proper civilian agencies in place, the tendency to call on the military for answers in foreign policy will most likely continue. And no one is more dismayed at this prospect of mission creep than the military itself. As Gen. George Joulwan, a former Southern Command CinC, chillingly put it as he watched Colombia implode after the United States failed to follow up its war on the drug cartels with social, political and economic programs:
"We know how to begin something. We don't know how to end it."
Americans are a people unwilling to kill enough of our mortal enemies to ever win decisively before domestic politics assures ugly outcomes.