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| Speakers: | Tom Clancy, co-author, “Battle Ready” |
|---|---|
| Anthony C. Zinni, General, USMC (ret.); former commander in chief, CENTCOM; co-author, “Battle Ready” | |
| Moderator: | Walter S. Isaacson, president and CEO, The Aspen Institute |
June 1, 2004
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.
WALTER ISAACSON: [In progress]--at which point Charlie Rose [host of “Charlie Rose” on PBS] called me and said, “You must say this to him.” And I wrote it down. “He’s the most passionate and eloquent man of experience I’ve ever had on my show.” [Laughter.]
UNKNOWN: Oh!
ISAACSON: So I’ve gotten my plug in. [Applause.]
UNKNOWN: Pretty good job—
ISAACSON: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know what he said about you, I’m sorry to say. [Laughter.]
UNKNOWN: Oh…
ISAACSON: [Laughs.]
TOM CLANCY: Charlie and I haven’t spoken for a long—
UNKNOWN: Most laid-back, confident—
UNKNOWN: Yeah, great guy—
ISAACSON: [Laughs.] Yes. Well, you’ve been on [the] show many times, because I—
CLANCY: Charlie is such a— he’s a good pro [at doing an] interview.
ISAACSON: Yeah.
CLANCY: And he’s a mensch. He’s a good guy.
ISAACSON: Well, let me start with you, instead of going through the introductions, which is, explain to us the Commanders series, if you would.
CLANCY: Well, back in the mid-90s, I decided that the average American only knows about general officers what he sees in the movies. In the movies, they’re all drunken Nazis. [Laughter.]
And guess what. They’re really not like that. These are thoughtful, professional guys. They don’t screw their troops. They weep over their troops. I mean, I’ve seen some really tough guys get weepy about their soldiers, because they regard their soldiers as their own children. And that’s the way a general’s supposed to feel, but Hollywood doesn’t know that, because Hollywood only knows what happens in Los Angeles. And except for the earthquakes, it’s not a bad city, except what the hell do you do on weekends?
And I thought I’d do a series of books on what these guys are really like. And I learned along the way these are pretty good guys. [General] Freddie Franks taught poetry. I swear the core to Freddie’s personality is he once taught poetry at the university level at West Point. Chuck Horner, he’s a fighter pilot [with a] distinctive personality, putting it mildly— also pretty smart, knows the Middle East supremely well.
[General] Carl Steiner is a snake eater. He does have recipes for cooked snakes. He looks like your basic Southern gentleman— very courtly, very polite. He kills people. Now he has nightmares about it.
Tony [Zinni] here is a Marine. And he can really read and write— [laughter]--
ISAACSON: We’ll give you a chance for rebuttal, yes.
GENERAL ANTHONY ZINNI: I have to have a rebuttal here. [Laughter.]
CLANCY: The Marines are only stupid in the movies. In reality, they’re— in the 20th century, we had, what, four tactical innovations: The panzer blitz, the Germans invented that; amphibious assault, the Marines invented that; close air support, the Marines invented that; and helicopter assault, the Marines invented that, too. Three out of four, the U.S. Marine Corps invented. That is not the sign of a dumb organization. He also knows the Middle East fairly well, and better than some of the people we have in senior government positions. But that’s no surprise.
ISAACSON: Speaking of which, you’ve been somewhat— or very— critical recently, especially about the fact that people aren’t taking responsibility. Why don’t you tell us who should be taking responsibility and what would you do?
ZINNI: Well, I feel strongly that the most difficult and important decision the president makes is to commit us to military action. And we know the performance that our young men and women would give us; when we do that, they’re owed the best in equipment and training and the things that you obviously instinctively know we should. But we also owe them the rationale for putting their life at risk. We owe them the— to ensure that the intelligence, the rationale that is used is credible; that the strategy under which we are committing them is sound; that the planning that goes into this from our civilian leadership is competent and sound; that when we put them on the ground, those that have to do the counterpart pieces of political reconstruction, economic reconstruction are making sound decisions and are as well prepared as our military. And frankly, I did not see this, and that was the burden that fell to the Pentagon.
I think the troop strengths were insufficient in the beginning— over-reliance on the exiles, flawed or exaggerated intelligence. The Coalition Provisional Authority didn’t measure up and was an ad hoc pick-up team in the process. And I bitterly feel that we let down those great young men and women—
ISAACSON: “We” meaning the civilians in the Pentagon?
ZINNI: Yes. Directly.
ISAACSON: And if you were in charge, you would ask them to resign?
ZINNI: I would hold them responsible. However, the president decides that. History will hold them responsible. But I think the president was owed better than he received from the civilian leadership in the Pentagon.
ISAACSON: Why has nobody been held responsible?
ZINNI: Well, that’s a question for the administration not for me, because I can’t think we all believe this all went well.
Now, you can say, well, “It’s the fog and friction of war that it didn’t go well,” that well, “Things, you know, plans never survive the first contact.” You can have all the excuses in the world. But wait a minute. There were a number of us right at the beginning mouthing these concerns, voicing the issues and concerns that you don’t know what you’re going to get into. This is much more complex, much more difficult. You’re going to be trapped. [If] you’re not well prepared, you’re not trusting the right sources, you’re about to get yourself into something that will consume our military and distract us from other events.
Some of these people voicing these concerns were former commanders of CENTCOM, were former members of previous administrations, diplomats, and other military general officers, and we were ignored. There was sort of a let’s take the best-case assumptions in all this.
QUESTIONER: Would you support this— re-election of this president if nobody’s held accountable?
ZINNI: I could not support it if this civilian leadership of the Pentagon was going to repeat.
ISAACSON: That’s interesting. Let’s go to the audience here with that note. And please identify yourself. Yes, sir. Yeah, in the blue shirt. The one looking behind— yes. Here comes the microphone. And also, identify yourself if you would, please.
QUESTIONER: Sure. Again, my name is Said Arikat from Al-Quds Daily Newspaper. General Zinni, I wanted to ask you about your stint as an envoy to the Middle East. We had [former U.S. senator from Maine George] Mitchell, [Director of Central Intelligence George] Tenet, then Zinni, then [John S.] Wolf, [the assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation]. And they all seemed to fade away without anyone noticing. Could you explain to us why, sir?
ZINNI: I think the process of the special envoy is no longer useful. This is something that I gained through my experience. I think the idea of a special envoy as high profile, or whatever, that’s beamed in, that tries to magically do something in the short term or start a process and put it on a very narrow path, won’t work. I think, you know, what we end up doing is building these precursor [Middle East peace] plans (/background/mideast_plans.php)--the Mitchell plan, the Tenet plan. I swore when I got on the ground I would not have a Zinni plan. And guess what? I had a Zinni plan. [Laughter.] It was the biggest mistake I made out there. And so we fall into that trap.
What we need is a group on the ground, internationalized as much as we can make it with the quartet [the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia], that has a political and economic monitoring, a security element in it, that has an address there full-time. What I use as sort of a metaphor is: what we were trying to do is light a match, a fuse, and then hope it would burn along a single very narrow trail in a very sequential process; very easy for people to rub out and to erase. What we needed to do was light a thousand fuses. There were all sorts of opportunities— small economic cooperation programs, agreements— where we could work at a local level with security and political issues. We did not have the kind of mediation force on the ground to do that. We were relying on a very narrow path, whether you call it a road map or a path, that was too easily disrupted by those that don’t want this to happen.
I was confronted with the situation where I didn’t feel that I had people and leaders that were interested in taking risks and were willing to make compromises, and that’s unfortunate. I would have liked to have worked with a [Anwar] Sadat [former president of Egypt] and a [Yitzhak] Rabin [former prime minister of Israel]. I didn’t have a Sadat and a Rabin.
ISAACSON: And the leader you worked for in the United States, technically you were [Secretary of State] Colin Powell’s, the secretary of state’s, envoy, is that right?
ZINNI: Yes. It was very clear to me I was Colin Powell’s special adviser.
ISAACSON: And having read some of this, is it correct to say that you felt Secretary Powell and yourself got undercut by this administration?
ZINNI: No. I would say that Secretary Powell proposed something that I thought would assure those in the region that they could get back to the final status issues, we can get back to where we were at [the] Camp David [peace plan] and the Taba [plan] and those places. The people in the region didn’t take advantage of that.
I felt, though, that back here it has to be the president that has to be involved and committed to this. It can’t be a State Department program. This requires the office of the president to have its full weight and force behind any effort we do. And that’s one of the things I came to realize out there. They have to know you’re speaking for the president, not the secretary of state or anybody else—
ISAACSON: And they did not know you were speaking for the president?
ZINNI: I don’t think they were certain of that. It was clear by my title; I was special adviser to the secretary of state. So it’s easy to believe that you can work around, or you don’t have to believe that this is an administration policy.
ISAACSON: Yes. Back there.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Bill Jones, EIR news service. General Zinni, to what extent do you believe that the war in Iraq was driven more by a political agenda of the neoconservatives around [former assistant secretary of defense and former chairman of the Defense Policy Board] Mr. [Richard] Perle and [deputy secretary of defense] Mr. [Paul] Wolfowitz, under the cover of both the vice president and secretary of defense, more so than any concern about the war on terror or any concern about weapons of mass destruction?
ISAACSON: Good question.
ZINNI: Well, first of all, I believe there are those, the neoconservatives, that believed in their hearts that this could strategically change the face of the Middle East, and that were motivated by the belief that we needed to do something dramatic out there, that the people would rise up, receive us well, and this could be a catalyst for change. I don’t argue or debate their motivation. That’s not my intent. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories. I accept upfront that they thought this was a strategy that would work. Those of us that know the region of the world, lived out there, knew that this was not the kind of strategy that would work. The road to Jerusalem does not lead through Baghdad; it’s actually the reverse. In my mind, there were more important things to deal with, not only the issue of extremism, which is more than just the war on terrorism: our relationships in the region, the Middle East peace process, wither Iran and how it goes, and many other issues were a higher priority than Iraq.
I felt we effectively had contained Saddam Hussein. I said it before the war started that I was not opposed to military action against Saddam; I thought it was the wrong time and it would get us immersed and tied down, our military bogged down and overcommitted if we did it, and that we didn’t understand the depth and the complexity of the problems we were going to get into. And as this thing unfolded, I felt strongly we weren’t planning properly and we weren’t building in the counterpart pieces to the military operation— political, economic, social change— that was needed. And you can be the judge whether that panned out or not.
ISAACSON: But you say you contained Saddam. I’ve made the mistake of reading the book. I know that you really thought Saddam was lying, cheating, doing everything wrong. So what would you have done?
ZINNI: Well, first of all, what I think Saddam was [trying] to retain the framework for a program of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. He did not want to get caught with a so-called smoking gun. But the scientists were in place; they had, obviously, what they needed in terms of the knowledge. The dual-use facilities were there that could be turned over to produce biological and chemical agents. The missile program he was allowed to have, the Al-Samoud program, he can do R&D and other experimentation within the context of that.
What I think the Richard Butlers and the Rolf Ekeuses and then the Hans Blixes [all three worked on U.N. inspections] were on to was to say, “Our job is not only to find smoking guns, our job is to ensure you’ve dismantled this.” And they were not going to give him a clean bill of health unless they talked to these scientists, unless they understood that he couldn’t leap into this program.
That program, that framework, did not present an imminent threat. I mean, it wasn’t that there were weapon systems that had nasty stuff tipped on the end of it ready to deploy and shoot at us. It meant that we had to root that out and we had to keep pressure on him. Look, we bombed him every day at will. We controlled his airspace. You know, we had effectively allowed his military’s conventional forces to atrophy to nothing— proof is in how quickly we handled those forces, and we knew that for a long time that we could handle that.
There was no evidence of the kind of imminent or grave and gathering threat. I saw the intelligence right up to the day of the war, and it wasn’t there. I testified to that effect before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
ISAACSON: By the way, this is a wonderful book. You mentioned Richard Butler, the sort of— I think you capture that very well, how they’re— an interesting pairing there and stuff. And so I do want to urge you to buy the book afterwards and not just rely on the Q & A.
Bill.
QUESTIONER: Bill Heseltine, Human Genome Sciences. I have two questions, one for Tom Clancy. And that is, you’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of our great military leaders, and I wonder if you find— not just the differences that you’ve mentioned, but what’s in common?
And for you, General Zinni: What I’d be interested in knowing is where do we go from here, in your opinion? We all know how we got here; some of us agree with you, some of us probably disagree with you. But the question is, we all agree on that we have to go somewhere from where we are, how do we do it militarily, how do we do it politically? Where do you see— from all your experience in the Middle East— us going? What is a rational program to get from here to somewhere we’d like to be?
CLANCY: I suppose the main thing I’ve learned is these guys are all alike insofar as they devote their lives to the service of our country, and they’ve devoted considerably sized intellects toward that. These guys know their business. They’ve studied their business for, in Tony’s case, 40 years.
Now, a politician has a staff; they present position papers and bullet points, and they speak in front of cameras. Sometimes— if they’ve had acting lessons— they know how to present the points well. Laurence Olivier was a great actor; he probably would not have been a very good king, though he played kings very often, and sometimes with great authority. But playing a part and doing a part are not the same thing.
These guys genuinely know what they’re talking about. They’ve taken the time to study the personalities, the physical realities, and game out what’s going to happen— if we do this, somebody else is going to do that, and how do we get from point A to point B? That’s what professional soldiers do, try to accomplish real missions in real time using real weapons and real people.
A politician is a different sort of a critter. A politician is mainly geared towards symbols and statements, and he generally isn’t around to clean up the mess that he causes. That’s a sad fact. I mean, in the 1960s they had the Great Society. We’re still paying the bill for that one, you know. We attacked the root causes of crime; the root causes of crime won. And where are the politicians to clean up the mess? They’re on other bullet points now, talking about something else we’re going to screw up.
Professional soldiers, on the other hand, have to deal with reality, and when they make a mess, they got to clean up the mess, as a result of which you have people who generally are more honest, more thoroughly prepared for their missions, and generally more— you know— just more intelligent, because they approach a problem from a practical point of view, and politicians think in terms of symbols.
ISAACSON: Welcome to Washington. [Laughs.]
CLANCY: I live an hour from here. I don’t come here any more than I have to.
ISAACSON: [Laughs.] Some of us love it. But speaking of the mess that has to be cleaned up, that was the second half of Dr. Heseltine’s question.
ZINNI: Well, do you mean Iraq or the region in general?
QUESTIONER: Iraq.
ZINNI: Iraq? OK.
QUESTIONER: Specifically Iraq.
ISAACSON: Start with some easy, Iraq. [Laughter.]
ZINNI: OK. Well, something interesting happened today. They threw us out of the engine in this train, and we’re now somewhere back in the middle car, heading toward the caboose. That’s not all bad. I mean the United States, in terms of being in charge. There was somewhat of a coup in Baghdad, I think. I think the [Iraqi] Governing Council decided that it wasn’t going to be [U.N. envoy to Iraq Lakhdar] Brahimi or [Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul] Bremer; they were going to decide this. And they, you know, usurped our position, and they have now decided on who the interim government’s going to be.
Interestingly enough, the interim government leader now— leadership is charging to New York. And there’s going to be an interesting relationship between this leadership, who we are— we have stated, full up— our president— we will give full sovereignty— and the Security Council.
So guess what. The French, the Chinese, the Russians, and others, the Germans, will all begin this direct dialogue. Where does that leave us? It’s interesting. We could be on the sidelines watching this process and this resolution. And if it isn’t quite what we like, what are we going to do about it? And we— should we veto it? Not? Let this move on.
So there could be good news, in that they’ve taken charge in this process, in a way. But they have a long way to go. What they have to do is return and establish credibility with the Iraqis. They have to be seen as representative and acceptable to the Iraqis. That’s their first mission. The second thing is, they have to show a full commitment to working toward making these elections work. I, for the life of me, don’t know how they’re going to do it in eight months. It’s a hell of a process. But the important thing is if they’re seen as trying to build their power base, as opposed to working toward Brahimi’s vision— totally commit themselves toward the election, at the expense of even their own power— then there’s going to be problems.
From here to there, we’re bystanders in this process now. And again, that can be good. But unfortunately, the one issue that remains with us is security, and it’s going to be hell to pay. The bad guys are going to come at this in the short term with a vengeance, and there is nobody else on the ground that can deal with it, other than us. I don’t believe a U.N. resolution is suddenly going to produce boots on the ground, you know, because right now they’re in the best of both worlds. [The United Nations] can have what they want dealing directly with the Iraqis and not have to pay the price of putting boots on the ground, unfortunately. So we will bear the brunt.
We have made a superb decision, and Dave Petraeus, Major General Petraeus, is heading up the training and the development of the Iraqi security forces— army, border patrol, police. We ought to give him everything he needs, every resource, whatever is necessary.
I think the key is going to be to now try to get the Iraqis invested in a sense of ownership of this problem. We need economic development. I would bring those Iraqi businessmen to some sort of convention in the region, hosted by regional powers, and try to bring foreign investors and say, “Look, we will underwrite the security. You tell us what you need in term of infrastructure repair, reconstruction to get jobs, jobs, jobs.” I would put the hammer down on these contractors we have out there. Why do we have a truck driver from West Virginia? We need a truck driver from Baghdad— doesn’t take a lot of skill to drive a truck. I want our vested interest in getting that truck through by an Iraqi.
And so we are going to go through, my guess would be, about one year of critical time. What has to happen in that year? This interim government has to be accepted. This interim government has to commit itself, along with the United Nations, to make this election work. We have to commit ourselves to put— to develop viable security forces on the ground. We have to work with this community to build the sense of ownership amongst Iraqis. That’s going to be done primarily through the political acceptance that they are going to self-determine their governance and to some sort of sense of an economy and a sense of well-being, where there are jobs and something that they’re willing to fight for. The critical time is going to come over the next eight months to one year.
ISAACSON: If you were the CENTCOM commander still, would you allow your troops to serve under an Iraqi?
ZINNI: No. No.
ISAACSON: OK.
ZINNI: I mean, you never— command of U.S. troops will always be under a U.S. commander. And I’ll tell you another thing: Nobody’s going to tell me when I’m on offense or defense. That’s going to be my decision. And I’m convinced the president, any president, would back that up. You can’t put our troops in a position where they lose that. But look, there will be sovereignty, but on the issue of security, let’s be honest with each other. The issue of security comes down to U.S. forces providing security, and U.S. forces will have to make that determination until we get to the point where we have viable Iraqi forces. And that will probably come in some sort of phased way if we support them and build them, train them, and educate them and give them the kind of vested interest and willingness to stand up to the threat will come over time.
ISAACSON: Mr. Moody.
QUESTIONER: Jim Moody [of Morgan Stanley]. An observation quickly, and then a question. I was interested in your— I was struck by your comment that we should hold the civilian leadership in the Pentagon accountable. The phrase “in the Pentagon,” could that be left off, a la Harry Truman? My question—
ISAACSON: I’m sorry, sir. Is your question about the president of the United States and the vice president?
QUESTIONER: No, that’s— no, that’s just observation.
ISAACSON: Oh. [Inaudible.]
QUESTIONER: I was struck by the fact that you’d let “in the Pentagon” --the phrase “in the Pentagon” was—
ISAACSON: Well, actually, let me let you answer that. You basically think it’s the Pentagon civilians who bear most responsibility?
ZINNI: I do. That’s what I said.
ISAACSON: Yeah. OK.
ZINNI: Yeah. And it’s in the Pentagon.
QUESTIONER: OK.
ISAACSON: OK. Thank you.
ZINNI: In the Pentagon.
ISAACSON: OK. [Laughs.] OK.
ZINNI: Civilian.
ISAACSON: OK. In the Pentagon. OK.
QUESTIONER: Question. We’ve all been treated— or we’ve all been exposed ad nauseam— to these prison photos, et cetera. In your military experience, could that simply be the one model? We’re presented with two models: It’s a few bad apples; [It’s] something much more systematic. In your military experience, could it have been the former model at work?
ZINNI: Well, I think we ought to be careful about all this. Let the investigations and the inquiries play out. We’ll get at the bottom of this. There are probably a number of possibilities. You mentioned two: a few bad apples. The other is a leadership failure. No matter how you cut this, there will be a leadership failure as part of the problem eventually, you know. Or is it some sort of policy implementation that was passed down, either directly or indirectly, or understood? We shouldn’t speculate on that. I think it’s dangerous. If I were the commander, say CENTCOM or whatever, I would say lay off, let us get to the— don’t speculate, don’t create more problems through that speculation— let us get to the bottom of this. We’ll find it. The strength in our system [is that even though we] made a mistake— it’s horrible, it’s terrible— we can show you in our system how accountability and openness and honesty works. And I think there’s some opportunity here. You’re not going to overcome the images, but you’re going to show our system at its best as to how we deal with this in the world. We would make a mistake in this political year to prejudge this, to speculate and to politicize it. It would not be good for our forces, our troops, for the due process that’s necessary, and for us to demonstrate how we handle these things best within our own system of justice.
ISAACSON: Yes, sir, back there. Oh, Andrew. Hey.
QUESTIONER: Andrew Pierre, Georgetown University. General Zinni, and Tom Clancy may want to answer this too, one of the striking characteristics of this war has been the widespread use of contractors. I’d like your judgments as to whether this is a good development or whether it bears— there have to be costs attached to it. How widespread should contracts be used? I was going to ask the question just asked about intelligence, but let me sort of rephrase that slightly. Is it good to use contractors for intelligence? And more broadly, quite apart from what history may judge in terms of our intelligence activities, from a war-fighting standpoint, did we move too far in simply rounding up thousands of Iraqi civilians without knowing for certain if they had any real involvement in the conflict, and then holding them for months, if not years, now, and then freeing them without any real evidence of why we held them in the first place?
ZINNI: Well, there are many things we’re going to learn from this intervention, because there are some very unique things that happened, embedded media, as an example, and we’ll learn lessons from that, the good and not so good, and how to improve it. We have never had, probably, in our history the extensive use of contractors that we have had here. And I think we’re going to have to go back and look at this. In general, contracting is good. You know, for example, when we were in the hills of northern Iraq with the Kurds, we were trying to feed Kurds through our system. By feeding them through our distribution system and our MREs [meals ready to eat], we were feeding Kurds at a rate of $5 per day per Kurd. When Mort Abramowitz, who was the ambassador to Turkey, said, “You guys would be smart to contract this out, use local Turkish truck drivers, use local Turkish food, which is more compatible with the diets there. It would be more economical, and it would be received better,” we went down to $1 per Kurd per day. It was a smart move. There are contracting things we do logistically.
There are contracting things we do that involve the local civilian population; again, my point about a sense of ownership. What we need to look at— and I think this judgment is going to have to be made— is did we overdo it here? When I see two civilians and two Marines all shooting side by side, but I know the Marine makes $18,000 a year and the civilian makes $118,000 a year, I got a problem with that. If I’m that Marine, I’ve got a problem with that, you know. And so, you know, to what extent and in what areas is contracting appropriate?
The other question is going to be how do we control and monitor the contracting? I think I heard something in the tune of 20,000 contractors doing security work there. Now look, we have had contractors in this region picking up security missions that have been very efficient, very effective. Our pre-po [pre-positioned] sites in Kuwait and elsewhere have been civilian contractors, former military that pick up this sort of protective services, if you will, and they do an excellent job. But are we going overboard when you suddenly see them in a firefight next to Marines and soldiers in this environment?
We contract out intelligence work, we contract out interrogation. Where are we going with that? We are going to have to come back and take a hard look at this and see where the limits are and where the controls are, where the cost-benefit is, and do we get a better product in the end, rather than putting it in uniform or handling it directly and through some government agency or organization.
ISAACSON: Dr. Pierre mentioned the intelligence, and you just touched on it briefly. How flawed was the intelligence, since you saw it at the time leading up to it, and now in retrospect we get to know what was true, especially on weapons of mass destruction [and] the intentions of Saddam Hussein?
ZINNI: I didn’t see, even in the worst case— and the worst case being the unaccounted-for weapons of mass destruction— the artillery rounds, the rockets rounds— even if they were there, how they presented an imminent threat to us in any way. I didn’t see in the hard intelligence I saw that sort of imminence in the threat that required us to rush to war.
I was confused by our approach, because on one hand I saw the secretary of state going to the United Nations, magnificently getting a 15 and 0 vote on Resolution 1441 [which called for Iraqi compliance with the U.N. inspection regime], getting the inspectors back in, and starting a process, based on my experience and that I’ve seen there, that was a nine-month to one-year process at least. But at the same time, I was watching the Department of Defense going to war in March, you know. And so they did not match. It wasn’t a military deployment in support of diplomacy. We had two different tracks; we had a diplomatic track that was on a timeline that was different than the military deployments. Look, those of us in the military can watch what you’re deploying. I can see things subtly in those deployments that say it’s a show of force, it’s supporting diplomacy, it’s showing the mailed fist that’s ready to land if you don’t act, but not done in a way where it’s a “use it or lose it”--you got to go because it’s going to be hot in the summer, or whatever. What I was seeing on the military side was we were going to war in March, no matter what. What I was seeing on the diplomatic side is we were beginning a process that had to last until the fall or even into the winter to be complete before Hans Blix, [director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency] Mohamed El Baradei, and all would come to their conclusions and deliver their findings to the Security Council.
ISAACSON: Well, was that all a sham, is what you’re telling us?
ZINNI: I don’t know. I mean, that’s a question we need to ask ourselves: Which one was the real track? They were mutually exclusive, in my mind. I mean, if you were going to war in March no matter what, you were deployed to go to war—
ISAACSON: Why would you go to the U.N.--
ZINNI: --why was the business in New York happening? If the business in New York counted, then the deployments would be more measured, more symbolic, more done in a way where we didn’t over-commit, didn’t get ourselves in a position where we had to pull back forces or get into a use it or lose it situation on the ground. There was a mismatch in my mind.
ISAACSON: Well, if you don’t mind, sir, let me push just one more time on the intelligence, because you mentioned Secretary Powell’s speech, the— I mean, he gives a speech in which he lists all the intelligence we have, and it turns out to be wrong. And then in the [Washington Post correspondent Bob] Woodward book [“Plan of Attack”], DCI Tenet said, “It’s a slam dunk,” but it wasn’t a slam dunk. Is there accountability to be held there as well?
ZINNI: Well, that’s what I think these inquiries have to find. I heard George Tenet at his speech (http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2004/tenet_georgetownspeech_02052004.html) at Georgetown say that we— and I think I’m quoting this pretty accurately— we never said the threat was imminent.
ISAACSON: Correct. But he never denied saying the slam dunk— [inaudible]--turned out to be.
ZINNI: Well, they don’t match. They don’t match then. I don’t know about the slam dunk statement. I know what I heard. The only— [audio break]--which they didn’t do that night. [Laughter.]
ISAACSON: All right. Oh, sorry. Judith, you’re in charge. I’ll go to her first and then --
QUESTIONER: [Inaudible]--Judith Kipper, Council on Foreign Relations. I want to change the subject a little bit, to terrorism. Iraq is a sad case. It’s unfortunate. Didn’t have to be this way— 25 million people. But I have every confidence that the Iraqis, once they get their hands on their own destiny, they will prevail. But I want to ask about the war on terrorism. It seems to me that [Pakistani nuclear scientist] A.Q. Khan did more damage in the long-term, in terms of nuclear proliferation, one-stop shopping in Pakistan, than Osama bin Laden and Saddam could do together. How do we deal, in a democratic society, with transnational threats that require multilateral approaches and get away from the slogan “war on terrorism,” which is utterly meaningless? It’s not a war; terrorism has always been with us; the extremism happens to be coming from Arabs and Muslims at the moment. This seems to me a really deep and big issue for the United States of America at this moment, because we’re obsessed, and it’s not a good idea for democracies to be obsessed.
ISAACSON: You want to take that—
CLANCY: Your first line of defense against that kind of a threat can only be good intelligence, and that means human intelligence, not satellites and not intercepts. As useful as intercepts and satellites are, they can’t tell you what a person’s thinking, unless he picks up his satellite cell phone and we can listen in. Now, America destroyed its human intelligence capability back in the ‘70s. We haven’t bothered building it back. Now there was a senator, I believe a Republican, some years ago was asking the DCI, you know, “What about rebuilding our human intelligence capabilities, the clandestine service of CIA?” And Director Tenet says it will take at least five years. And the guy says, “Well, what if we don’t have five years?” Well, my wife just made me richer by a baby daughter. It took her nine months. Three women can’t do it in three months. [Laughter.] Some things take the time they take, and one of those things is training field intelligence officers to be effective at their job. You know, Napoleon wanted to plant poplar trees along the roads of France so his armies wouldn’t have to march in the shade [sic]. And somebody said, “But it will take 20 years for the trees to grow.” Napoleon said, “Well, then start right now!” All right? If it’s going to take us years to rebuild this capability, then start right now, because your first line of defense is always going to be intelligence information. We ignore that because it’s not pretty and it’s not sexy to have guys creeping around on the field and whispering in people’s ears and making dead-drop pickups, but if you want to survive, it’s necessary.
ISAACSON: Do you want to add to that, general?
ZINNI: Yeah. You know, I teach a course at [the College of] William & Mary on national security strategy, and I try to explain to my students the difference between tactics, operations, and strategy. And after giving my magnificent class on all this, I ask them to take a look at the war on terrorism and define for me what the extremists’ centers of gravity were at each level, the tactical, the operational, and the strategic, and then tell me how well we were doing against each. They said at the tactical level it obviously was the ability to conduct acts of terrorism, which is very difficult for us to counter. I think [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice put it correctly when she said, “We have to be right 100 percent of the time; they only have to get it right once.” It’s an asymmetric threat that goes against us very well because of the nature of our military, our moral values, our open society, et cetera, everything you know. And we are probably doing fairly well at the tactical level, they assessed. We are taking down leadership, we are attacking their organization, keeping them on the run in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan, breaking cells down through law enforcement cooperation, cutting finances.
And then I said, “Well, what’s the operational level? At the operational level, what is the center of gravity?” They determined, my students, that it was the aberrant, twisted form of Islam that they used as a rationale for this. They need a rationale, they need a justification, so they twist Islam, they have this radical interpretation, and that’s the justification they need.
So then I said, “Well, what’s the strategic center of gravity? What is it at the strategic level that Osama bin Laden needs?” They said, “Well, that’s easy. He needs this continuous flow of angry young men, and now women, that feel dying for this cause is worth more than living in whatever condition they are. And the conditions that drive them to this are some sort of political, economic, or social conditions that are unacceptable.”
So if you’re going to deal with this at all three levels, my students tell me, we’re doing a great job at the tactical level. We need to engage with those in this region to get this Islamic dialogue going, to make sure the moderates and the other scholars recapture their own religion, set their pace, decide how that’s going to come into the 21st century and they’re going to deal with it. They can’t allow this aberrant form to take place, and that’s something they need to do because this is just as big a threat as they are. And then together in this region, which stretches from North Africa to the Philippines, from the southern provinces of Russia to Central Africa, the Islamic world, that we need to work together and change the conditions that make these angry young people willing to kill themselves. They are political issues, issues of social injustice, issues of economic conditions, some of which we, the United States, can help with. I liken it to the situation at the end of World War II when Harry Truman realized what Woodrow Wilson realized: If you don’t fix the conditions, you’re going to repeat this mess, because we keep doing it in Europe and in the Far East. And he made an unbelievable commitment that was not too popular in this country— 19 percent support for the Marshall Plan, the European recovery plan— [and] signed up to our first real military alliance in NATO; you know, made all sorts of hard decisions.
What we need to do is engage this region of the world. What can we do to cooperate, to ensure political reform, economic reform [so] that we have some sort of collective security arrangements that are viable and acceptable to deal with these problems; to encourage them, pressure them to work toward, you know, defining where they are in the 21st century; that we work together to ensure failed or incapable states don’t become pits or sanctuaries for these extremists.
Look, in my time at CENTCOM I kept screaming and yelling, the Central Asian states— Yemen, some of the East African states— these are the places that are going to breed these extremists. We have to get in there and help stem the tide. It means aid. It means military support. It means helping them change their form of governance, their economic systems. No one was interested in that investment, and now we’re paying a bigger price as a result.
ISAACSON: Did the invasion of Iraq make us more safe or less safe in this regard?
ZINNI: Well, you know, I don’t buy into that question because, you know, Iraq could have waited, as I said. We opened up a battlefield in this war on terrorism, if you will, that we didn’t need to open up right now. Eventually, the terrorists were going to get to Iraq and probably try to eliminate Saddam Hussein and create whatever they wanted to create in there. Eventually, we would have dealt with it. If we were smarter, we’d have done it sequentially and in an order that we could have handled, instead of opening it up. It has presented a problem because it has damaged our image. It has put us— not only in that region of the world, but throughout the world, you know, as not respected and [not] seen as trying to do the right thing in these places, even though that was our intention. So we are going to have to recover from that.
I agree with Judith. The hope here— and I’m an optimist when it comes to this region of the world— believe it or not, I believe the Iraqis themselves are going to finally decide we can’t count on anybody else and we got to fix it. It may not be the kind of utopian Jeffersonian democracy that we sort of raised the expectations toward, but it will be some sort of stability that I think they can gain. But it’s going to be a hell of a fight between now and then.
ISAACSON: Yes, sir.
QUESTIONER: Hi. Robert Murray, CNA Corporation. I was going to ask the terrorism question, too, but— and I loved the answer. It was very eloquent. So I’ll get another. I take my time anyway because I had another question.
You talked about this being a pick-up team. And it seems to me that the Bremer group and the military folks aren’t really on the same page a lot. Bremer, in particular, seems to be playing with a pick-up team, not trained, come over, stay a few months, disappear. Why are we in that situation? Have you ever uncovered any insights into why we have that kind of a lash-up?
ZINNI: Well, the problem is— look, the United States military has squadrons, battalions, fleets, things that deploy and go out there and handle security situations. When these situations go beyond just the dimension of security— warfighting, intervention, and military scale— when it involves a political or economic element, a social element, what is our, quote, deployable force? Does the State Department have battalions that go in and do economic reconstruction or political reconstruction? The Department of Commerce? The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance? Where are the counterparts that go out there to do this? We don’t have them.
So when we get into a situation like this, here we have the military fully ready to deploy, you know, a magnificent capability, and now we’ve got to scrape together on the run, in the midst of a crisis, the counterpart teams, and maybe the more important dimensions, rather than security.
If we watch this thing unfold— and what shocked me— I was watching [former Iraqi administrator, Lieutenant General] Jay Garner, who I respect tremendously. Jay and I were together in northern Iraq working with the Kurds. He’s a great man. I’m watching this small team that came together in a very short period of time, operating out of the Pentagon, that beamed itself into Baghdad and was going to reconstruct the country. And then the CPA was created. He was removed, however that worked. Bremer comes in, who was not in the original plan. They wanted 144 people. I thought you needed 144 people at a minimum per province, times 18, let alone overall. And they didn’t have them going in. Look, military guys I talked to said, “Phase four, the reconstruction— you stay out of that.” Well, when they put the bayonet in the last guy in the Republican Guard, and they looked over the berm behind him, where was phase four force? It wasn’t there. They were stuck with it. So the CPA then gets created, and they have unfilled billets. They scrape from every embassy in the world, force people in there, people that aren’t even qualified or know the culture, in many cases; bring in people that are not even in areas of their expertise, are insufficient in numbers. They begin to break down along the fault lines, Shia, Kurd, Sunni, as opposed to maybe the administrative divisions, the 18 provinces. You know, they begin to make mistakes, well-intentioned, on the ground.
Disbanding the Iraqi army— do you know, going back before my time as the CINC [commander in chief] at CENTCOM— I can’t say CINC now; we changed the lexicon; it’s “combatant commander.” God forbid we should be commanders in chief. [Laughter.] But you know, back before my time, every time we struck Iraq, we put leaflets down on the regular army. We sent private communications saying, “If the time ever came, we fight. We’ll take care of you if you don’t fight.” Well, what happened to that? Where is the corporate memory in all that? We disband the army. We put these angry men out on the street, you know, and we need security forces. Sure, they should have been purged at the highest level. We de-Baathified to the point where we lost competent people who didn’t have blood on their hands. We gave a sense to the Sunnis that they’re going to be held responsible for Saddam Hussein, you know, where there should have been some sort of reconciliation program down the road— again, not for those with blood on their hand.
But we make a series of these kinds of mistakes, even simple ones— the “Weekend at Bernie’s” fiasco with the bodies of the two sons [Uday and Qusay Hussein], you know, where we didn’t know quite how to handle it. There was an excellent opportunity to turn that over to the governing council, and say, “We’ve killed them. Here they are. Bury them in Muslim tradition, in 24 hours. Acknowledge who they are. Do what you want; it’s your decision.” What do we do? We take pictures, we float them around, you know, that they’re kept out. There wasn’t enough thought, enough cultural sensitivity, enough experience, enough coherence to this organization, cohesion that it should have had going into this unbelievable task not to reconstruct a country, to construct a country that had never known the things we were trying to bring it to.
And so the frustration to me is seeing these magnificent young men and women in uniform, that know what the hell they’re doing, and then seeing the guys in seersucker suits that don’t have a clue. And that was the responsibility of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. They took it on.
ISAACSON: You told [ABC anchor] George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that we shouldn’t be making threats that we’re not going to carry through on. Do you want to— because that’s in your litany?
ZINNI: Yeah. You know, in this part of the world, strength is important. And strength doesn’t necessarily come from bravado or ultimatum; strength comes from what you demonstrate. We got ourselves trapped in these things of making threats against [anti-American cleric Muqtada al-] Sadr, against the insurgents in Falluja. And probably what we have done in the long run to try to negotiate through this or use Iraqis was the right thing to do. But then what we’re seeing is backing off the ultimatum. Don’t make the ultimatum. You know, why do we have this sense where we have got to have this “bring it on” sense, because in this part of the world, those threats if you don’t live up to them, look like a sign of weakness.
Let me tell you a little something about what happened to us in northern Iraq with the Kurds. We went in to northern Iraq to return the Kurds home, and we had the Iraqi army with a three-star general that we were confronting. General [John M.] Shalikashvili led the task force. We would go in front of [the Iraqi general] and say, “Move your divisions out of this sector, we’re coming in. We’re returning the Kurds home.” He would balk and moan and groan, and we said, “Move out, or we’ll move you out.” He moved out. And they complied every step of the way, four sectors. We got to the last sector. General Shali said, they’ve been cooperative, they’ve done well, let’s try something different. On this one, we’re going to go in the provincial capital of Dohuk, and we’ll say, “Look, you’ve been cooperative. We will not bring combat arms forces in. We will just bring military police, engineers, and others. You withdraw, we won’t bring combat armed forces in, and so we’ll do this in a way that, again, won’t look like you backed down.” [The Iraqi] three-star general, said “No, I’m not.” And Shali said, “You SOB, we’ll come in and kick you out and we’ll move you.” “Oh. OK. We’ll move.” [Laughter.]
You know? You know, what he sensed was weakness. Why the hell would you now offer to be kinder and do something else? You’ve got the strength. You know, I mean the common sense tells you don’t say it unless you mean it. If you say it, you better do it. But don’t get into this trap; just demonstrate on the ground what you’re going to do. Work with the possible. But we’ve got to get out of this business of issuing ultimatums that we don’t follow through on. And I’m saying that what happened in Falluja and what happened in Najaf and Kufa and other places may have been the right way to go. You at least owe it a try. But don’t start it out where you have to then engage in that and it looks like you backed down from a position of strength that you stated.
ISAACSON: Yes, ma’am? Right here.
QUESTION: My name is Amanda Butler and I’m from the University of Chicago. In your response to the question on contractors, you said, “When we went into the hills of northern Kurdis” --and then you corrected yourself— “to the hills of northern Iraq.” Do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile the competing factions in Iraq? For the most part, until recently, the Iraqis have been spoken of in fairly homogenous terms, and I was wondering if you thought there would be one country coming out, multiple countries, how to make a working democracy.
CLANCY: The world’s great expert on Kurdistan here. [Laughs.]
ZINNI: Well, I do think we should— obviously we should commit ourselves to the territorial integrity of what is Iraq. It may not be a natural state. Obviously, you know— of course, you know, the belief is the Brits created this. [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia overdrew the lines of the map. But there’s no reason to walk away from a belief that we can create some sort of a state that can work together. They at least in this step seem to be— today’s step— they seem to be working together and seem to be trying to have a representational government from each of the factions in there. And I don’t think we should abandon that, certainly not at this point. There’s no reason to. We need to try to make this thing stay together. It’s important for the region, it’s important for the signal we send. You don’t need to create three states that are not viable when you can possibly create one state that is very viable, and I think that would be a mistake in the long run.
I don’t think we’re there yet where we should be throwing up our hands and looking at [the partitioning of Iraq]. That unleashes a whole set of other problems, if you begin to go toward a Shia state, Kurdish state, and a Sunni rump state in the middle. I think you’re going to unleash all sorts of problems that will be much greater than the ones we face now in trying to keep it together.
ISAACSON: Yes, sir?
QUESTIONER: David Merkel. General Zinni, you said two things that appear to be inconsistent, which is—
ZINNI: Only two? [Laughter.]
QUESTIONER: Well, don’t make any empty threats, but then the deployment, and you would know better than us, the deployment should have been a show of force but not a deployment that would actually move to engagement or an invasion if the diplomacy wasn’t on the right track. That’s my first question.
My second question—
ISAACSON: Since we all have Alzheimer’s, let him do one at a time, and I promise to let you follow-up. OK?
QUESTIONER: No, the second is, you both seem dynamic personalities. I wonder if you could say what you had the greatest disagreement on that’s in the book, or perhaps the greatest disagreement that didn’t make the book.
ZINNI: On the first one, you misunderstood what I said. You can deploy forces that send a signal that you mean business without committing things to the ground that mean you got to the war, like logistics units and units that obviously can’t stay a long time without being committed. It doesn’t mean that the things you’ve committed aren’t part and parcel or pieces that you need if you decide to go to war. It’s how you carefully select those units that show the most symbolic points of strength, the show a force. It doesn’t mean that by doing that it’s hollow; it’s, you’re deploying forces that could easily be removed, that could more easily be sustained through periods of time there. You’re not putting things on the ground that are going to be very expensive to maintain that have to be used, that create a burden on you because of their absence elsewhere, if you get what I mean. You know, and that’s not what was happening.
We did that in the past. When Richard Butler— and it looked like the inspectors were going to come out and throw up their hands, we began deploying forces in there as a show of force, the kinds of forces that we put on the ground in the mid-90s to signal to Saddam, “We’re going to nail you if you don’t cooperate.” And each time, up until 1998 in [Operation] Desert Fox, he did. He folded his hand at the last minute. And I think he misjudged and went over the edge in ‘98 when we hit him on Desert Fox. So it’s not that the forces you’re putting out there are hollow; it’s the way you carefully select the ones that don’t put the strain on you and create that “use it or lose it.”
On the second question, I don’t think there was— Tom said to me, “This is your story, and you tell it like. It doesn’t necessarily agree with my views and opinions.” But this is a combination biography/autobiography, and I think he felt strongly that it ought to be who I am. And I’ll leave it to him to answer to that too.
CLANCY: I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in your field. I’ve never been a Marine, never had any particular desire to be a Marine— maybe I was stupid— [laughter]--and I can’t replicate 40 years of experience. So it was your job, Tony. You did a good job.
ISAACSON: Thank you. Way in the back there. Yes, ma’am? I’ll get both of you. Yeah, you first and then the other woman who was standing up. You both get in. Yes.
QUESTIONER: Thank you very much. Natasha [inaudible], Slovenia. Listening about for a month about these prisoner abuses and the misconduct of American soldiers, I was wondering one thing, when reading [The] Washington Post today that suggested this jewelry stealing of American soldiers and stuff. Could you draw us or tell us more about the profile of American soldier? Is he or she coming from big cities or small ones, from rich families or poor families? What is the main reason for joining the Army? Thank you.
ZINNI: That’s a good question. I think after Vietnam, when we went to the all-volunteer military, we decided that the military was going to be much different. It was going to be smaller, much more sophisticated in the requirements we placed on them, much more technical. And we knew we had to attract bright people and people that were willing to stay in and make it a career. And obviously, we upped the things that would be incentives: quality of life, benefits, those sorts of things, the opportunity for education, career tracks that led somewhere.
I think we did a remarkable job. I was surprised, in my headquarters at CENTCOM before I left, when my sergeant major had me go around and ask my enlisted men and women what their educational levels were. Bachelor’s degrees were common, Master’s degrees were not uncommon, and there were several Ph.D.’s in the enlisted ranks there. So I think we draw— we have, to this point, drawn from most of society.
I worry about one thing. We will always draw, I believe, in the officer ranks, if we continue, from all strata of society. I worry that if we don’t keep up the quality of life and the benefits, the career opportunities, the stability in family life and those sorts of things, that we will begin to see the enlisted ranks drift toward what you suggested, the inner city, people coming from poor rural communities. [And they will see] this [as] a way of getting out of that, as a way of seeking an opportunity to move on, [and] we will get a significant number of minorities as a result. And we can’t let that happen. There is a sense that benefits are eroding, pay is eroding. The turmoil of life in the military is very difficult for families. And we’ve got to correct those things so that we can draw from all strata of society.
I believe the military needs certain reforms. One of the reforms is in our personnel system. We take a young man or woman that, say, is 18 years old, out of high school and enlists, and then on a normal 20-year career, we put him or her out at age 38. We invest all this money in training and education, and we put them out in the prime of their lives. We have the same up-or-out system that the Roman army did— 20 years because of the life span then. I mean, they’re out trying to find a second career and start it at age 38, 39, 40, 42. I mean, physically, mentally, in this day and age we should have a fuller career.
In the officer ranks we complain that we have such a short period of time to check the blocks. I’ve got to get command, I’ve got to get school, I’ve got to get this Joint Staff assignment. One of the great manpower gurus of the world back here, [retired vice admiral] Lee Gunn, is sitting here; he ran the Navy manpower system. You know, up or out; get promoted when you’re in that zone of just a few years.
ISAACSON: Your paper is rubbing against your microphone. Thank you. Sorry.
ZINNI: And I think that’s a mistake. We should allow people more time in grade, more education, more broadly experienced. One of the most valuable officers to a CINC, a commander in chief, a combatant commander, is a foreign area officer. These are officers who decide that they will take the time to learn— [brief audio break]--security assistance or attaché duty. They get killed in their occupational specialty when they come back, when they have to compete against their brother artillery officers, infantry officers, aviators. You know, if they had an eight-year time in grade, then they could do these things without prejudice.
If there was no such thing as a promotion zone— everybody’s eligible all the time— you could change the very nature of our structure. If you said to someone, this is a lifetime career; we trust that when you’re age 55 you’ll still be fit and capable— body, mind and spirit will be together— you’re not too old— I’m 61. I mean, I’m not old, right?
ISAACSON: [Laughs.] Right back there; there was one. Yes, ma’am? Because I skipped you before.
QUESTIONER: Yes. Amanda DeBusk, Miller and Chevalier. And the question for Tom Clancy is, what made you decide to write this book? And then a quick follow-up is, are there any heroines in this story, given that the best-known soldiers these days— both good and bad— are women? [Laughter.]
ZINNI: Thank God you got that question. [Laughter.]
Transcript ends.
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