Earlier this month, General Anthony Zinni, who headed the U.S. Central
Command from 1997 to 2000, bluntly criticized the Bush administration
before several hundred Naval and Marine officers: "My contemporaries,
our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam,
where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I
ask you, is it happening again?" He added: "We certainly blew
past the U.N. Why, I don't know. Now we're going back hat in hand."
According to the Washington Post, the general received "prolonged
applause" from the soldiers. Gulf War veteran Lt. General Paul
Van Riper commented: "I've never seen so much discontent among
the retired community."
The president's advisers who predicted the invading Yanks would be greeted
as "liberators" now are strangely mum and on the defensive.
Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz,
and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, envisioned a quick
victory and a rapid pacification of Iraq. They failed, however, to devise
a realistic exit strategy.
The victims of the defense department's miscalculations are the men
and women killed and wounded by the underground resistance against the
occupation. As of September 15, Central Command reported 165 fatalities
since May 1, when President Bush declared victory. In the war prior
to May 1, 139 US soldiers died. Since March 20, 1,580 Americans have
been reported wounded in Iraq.
Since neither the president nor Condoleezza Rice, his national security
adviser, has first-hand knowledge of the people and the conditions in
the Middle East, both have been heavily dependent upon expert advice.
Regrettably, however, it did not come from the nation's many experienced
Arabists, diplomats, and scholars who have lived in the region and are
intimately acquainted with its people and culture.
Instead, the White House received its policy recommendations from Secretary
Rumsfeld, his key associates, and his handpicked allies on the defense
policy board, all holding neo-conservative views. Many of them have
conflicts of interest because of their close ties with the military-industrial
complex. Their grandiose scheme for unilaterally crushing all regimes
and conspiracies hostile toward America apparently sounded promising
to the President and Condi Rice, but they learned only belatedly the
costs and risks of the policies they adopted.
The foreign leaders who refused to rush into a hasty invasion of Iraq
never objected to Saddam Hussein's ouster, but they feared an invasion
of Iraq would incite more virulent anti-Western violence in the Muslim
world. Now the Bush administration is trying, hat in hand, to persuade
the opponents of the invasion to help fight the disparate Iraqi and
foreign guerillas it spawned. Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz have lost
much of their credibility because the flaws of their scheme saddled
America with exceedingly costly policing and rebuilding problems to
which no end is in sight.
One wished the president and his invasion planners would now show the
good grace to admit that they erred in several of their crucial pre-war
assessments: that Saddam's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons
constituted an imminent threat; that the French, Russian, and German
opposition to the war was baseless and hostile; and that the American
and British forces in Iraq were fully sufficient to pacify Iraq.
When former U.S. Army chief Eric Shinseki told Congress that at least
200,000 soldiers would be needed to keep the peace in Iraq, Wolfowitz
ridiculed his estimate as being "wildly off the mark" and
asked him to retire. In his farewell address, Shinseki warned: "Beware
the 12-division strategy for a 10-division army." Just like in
the Vietnam War, the administration rightly vows to limit American casualties
but refuses to provide the manpower necessary to smother the enemy.
Maybe the President needs a new set of advisers, not starry-eyed ideologues
but pragmatic Middle East experts.