The 10 mistakes

Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CentCom commander, lists the catastrophic blunders made by the Bush team that led to the Iraq nightmare.

May 26, 2004 | I just came back from giving a lecture at UCLA yesterday, and the lecture was on the Middle East. I tried to step back and take a more strategic view of the Middle East and the issues out there and maybe give them a perception of the problems and issues from the eyes of those that live with it day to day: the Arabs, Israelis, all those that make up the peoples of the Middle East.

On the way back I was thinking about what to talk about here, and I know Iraq is a hot topic, and I thought I would stay with Iraq. And I thought on the airplane about how history is going to record what happened in Iraq, how we got into it, and obviously it's too early to tell. And oftentimes the outcome defines how history characterizes it.

But I thought about how much has been misconstrued about what has happened so far, especially at a time when I commanded CentCom and we were in the process of containing Iraq as part of the policy. And I thought about the mistakes we made, that, as Bruce [Blair, the president of Center for Defense Information] said, I've commented on before.

And what I thought I would do tonight is go through the 10 crucial mistakes to this point that we've made. Because I think it helps frame what, in fact, has happened over time ... and is going to be the first part of that history. And I will conclude with maybe some thoughts on the way ahead, at least from my point of view.

I think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I believe it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not sure ... but at some point I heard him say that "containment did not work." That's not true.

I was responsible -- along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to his two successors that were my predecessors, myself, and my successor, General Franks -- up until the war, we were responsible for containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about that containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 [President George H.W. Bush] accepting the U.N. resolution to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the U.N. resolution, and not after the war going to Baghdad, breaking the coalition, ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly saw would be a burden on us, our military, our treasury, and would break relations around the region, and would put him outside what he considered his international legitimacy for doing this -- the resolution by which he operated and conducted the war, and the resolution by which we established the sanctions.

Administering those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought. In the entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day we had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at the Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On any given day ... on an average day in CentCom, we had about 23,000 troops, soup to nuts. Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that with these 23,000 troops. The whole region. To top it off, those troops were not assigned to CentCom. In other words, that structure wasn't created to be part of CentCom, like the troops are in the Pacific Command or in the European Command. These were troops that were on rotation. They came from other places, from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific region. And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never created a structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we could up the rheostat or lower it when we needed to.

It was, in my view, what we would call in the military an "economy of force theater" without these assigned forces. We had no American bases out there. We were sharing bases with allies in the region who provided for us. Any given year, those in the region ponied up $300 million to $500 million to support our presence out there. What we called "assistance in-kind." They provided the fuel, the food, the water, the things we needed. The Saudis built a $240 million housing complex for our troops. Never once when we decided to take action against Saddam, when he violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the inspectors operated under, never once were we denied permission to use bases, or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any particular arrangement.

During that time, when we asked allies in that region to join us in other conflicts, like Somalia, they came. Egyptians came. Pakistanis came. The Saudis came. The Kuwaitis came. The Emirates came and provided forces. They joined us in the Balkans. They joined us elsewhere on operations when we needed them. We ran the largest military exercises in the world ... in this part of the world. In Egypt we did "Bright Star." We built a magnificent coalition of forces, without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its size from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left command, not only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete equipment, ill-trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot of absenteeism. We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable force. We saw them as a decaying force.

We couldn't account for all the weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors that were in there had to assume that the weapons of mass destruction that were in his original inventory that we could not account for might still be there. So that was always a planning factor. But when you look hard at that, these were artillery shells, rocket rounds, that he would have to be hiding somewhere that were getting old. And if he had to bring them out and use them, think about this, he's got to move them to artillery positions, to battery positions, under total dominance of the air by the United States. I sure as hell wouldn't have been ... want to be that battery commander that said tomorrow you're going to get five truckloads of chemical weapons to be stored in your area to shoot. Not under the air power we brought down and the ability to interdict them. And these were tactical capabilities.

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