Read some of his prophetic remarks in A Commander's Reflections
The address does give some insight into Gen. Zinni's opposition to an Iraq campaign. In his departing address, summing up his career, he declared the Powell Doctrine and symmetrical warfare dead; operations other than war (OOTW) the future. He said Saddam was too smart to take us on a second time symmetrically. Zinni bemoaned the fact that it is extremely difficult to mobilize the support of the American people behind this new kind of war.
Zinni's predictions of attacks on small U.S. units as well as a catastrophic terrorist attack are indeed chilling.
So, authorizing an attack on Iraq by at least in part conventional units cuts against many of Gen. Zinni's summing up conclusions.
It's too bad because the presently contemplated campaign indeed is based on many of the General's conclusions.
We were attacked in a catastrophic manner, but not with WMD. The country united behind action, as he hoped and wanted. We responded in a brilliant campaign in Afghanistan with asymmetric warfare.
The administration agrees with General Zinni that we will likely be the target of a WMD attack and believes the most likely source of the weapon will be Iraq. Further agreeing with Gen. Zinni, Saddam will not launch the attack symmetrically, but will likely hide all involvement. Thus, the need to disarm and eject the Baathist regime.
The main hole in the General's reasoning seems to be to swing too far in the opposite direction from WWII/Gulf War I type warfare to a belief that no conventional units should be involved in OOTW or asymmetric warfare. In fact, a great deal of the success in Afghanistan is blending conventional with unconventional units with new technologies that baffled and stunned the enemy. This will likely happen again in a larger scale in Iraq.
In some ways Gen. Zinni is as stubborn in his approach as the Weinbergers and Powells he criticizes, which may explain his present contrariness.
While I honor Gen. Zinni's service and his creative thinking, I still believe he is justifiably criticized over the Cole. He is not responsible for the Clinton draw-down of fleet oilers. He is not responsible for bad intel or lax shipboard security. But the decision to move refueling to Aden was taken on his watch. Yemen is Indian Country for the reasons I already described, weak central government, chronic instability, presence of Al Qaeda, support for Saddam in the Gulf War. A solution involving even a moderately friendly power, such as Djbouti (a French port), Egypt, Saudi or Oman would have been preferable, although not foolproof. The fact that a number of ships refueled in Aden before the Cole is really irrelevant. We know it takes the terrorists time to prepare an operation, as it did with Khobar Towers, the Africa Embassies and Mogadishu (operations that bracketed Yemen).
I still remember my shock that we were using Aden with no significant security presence and further shock that the primary reason was because of the strained relations between the U.S. and Yemen that we hoped buying fuel would improve.
But, perhaps I'm too hard on the General. True, blowing a hole in a ship with a small boat bomb isn't too different from blowing off the side off a building with a truck bomb, but before the Cole no one had done it before. And I'll be darned if a tanker didn't just sail right into another Yemeni port and get itself blown up despite specific warnings directed to tankers.
Freegards.