As the
grandiose plan of America's leading neo-conservatives
about extending US power and influence in Iraq and the
Middle East in the name of implanting democracy hits new
lows, a former commander-in-chief of US Central Command
(which covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia),
retired General Anthony Zinni (1997-2000), aired a
scathing criticism of the Bush administration on the CBS
program Sixty Minutes on Sunday night. Zinni's
verdict: heads of those who were responsible for
strategic and operational aspects of the Iraq invasion
should roll.
Elaborating on whom should be
fired, he told Sixty Minutes correspondent Steve
Kroft: "Well, it starts at the top. If you're the
secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If
you're responsible for that planning and that execution
on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the
other elements, non-military, non-security, political,
economic, social and everything else, then you bear
responsibility. Certainly those in your ranks that
foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly
they ought to be gone and replaced."
Zinni is
not among run-of-the mill retired generals who regularly
appear on a number of major television channels as paid
consultants. He is one of the most respected generals,
and he has educated himself to be a diplomat and a
statesman. After his retirement, he served as President
George W Bush's top diplomat in jump-starting the
Palestinian Liberation Organization-Israeli peace
process. As a leading strategic thinker, and as an
imaginative military man, he did not agree with the
timing or the very act of United States' invasion of
Iraq.
In his book, Battle Ready, which he
co-authored with well-known fiction writer Tom Clancy,
Zinni was even more poignant. "In the lead-up to the
Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum,
true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at
worse, lying, incompetence and corruption. I think there
was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the
ground and fully understanding the military dimensions
of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of
planning."
The Bush administration has not
treated very kindly those who disagreed with its Iraq
policy. Bob Woodward, in his book Plan of Attack,
notes that former president George H W Bush's national
security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, was frozen out of
government briefings after he publicly opposed the
then-impending plan of invading Iraq.
Zinni's
experience in this regard is more personal and equally
unpleasant. He had criticized the neo-conservatives for
using the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize US
interests in the region and strengthen the position of
Israel. Those included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith,
former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle,
National Security Council member Eliot Abrams and Vice
President Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby. For his naming of those individuals, he told
Kroft, he was called "anti-Semitic". He added: "I mean,
you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal
attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and
those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who
they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic
religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested."
When a heady crisis of the magnitude of the
United States' continued occupation of Iraq promises to
get worse, those in charge of that policy turn on the
critics of such a policy. That reality continues to
poison the environment of Washington today. Those who
created the sand dunes of that policy are increasingly
realizing how tenuous their arguments were to begin
with. Now, instead of examining how to rectify past
mistakes, they are not even attempting to make the best
of a very bad situation. They are defaming those who
have the courage of stating publicly that the emperor
has no clothes.
America's policy in Iraq was
wrong-headed, and it remains so today. The Abu Ghraib
prison abuse scandal has now touched the top US military
representative in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo
Sanchez. The US Army dismissed a report in the
Washington Post of Sunday that suggested Sanchez was
present during some of the alleged abuse of detainees at
that prison. The chances are high that, despite his
denials of any knowledge, the whispering campaign for
his resignation will only increase in volume in the
coming days. To complicate matters further, America's
former golden boy, Ahmed Chalabi, has come under
increased suspicion of passing America's secrets to
Iran. US and Iraqi forces ransacked his office last
week. Chalabi now knows his career is doomed. In a
desperate attempt to salvage this, he is publicly trying
to create a distance from the US rulers of Iraq. His
newest call: "Let my people go."
Bush was to
embark on a public relations campaign starting on Monday
to create public support for staying the course in Iraq.
Zinni has not even a smidgen of doubt of the failure of
that policy, "There has been poor operational planning
and execution on the ground," he said. "And to think
that we are going to 'stay the course', the course is
headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change
course a little bit, or at least hold somebody
responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's
been a failure."
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is
an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
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