THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GENERAL ZINNI
Courtesy of the careful efforts of Dr. H.H. Gaffney and Mr. William D. O’Neil, we have a summative record of General Anthony Zinni’s recent remarks on the state of the world, Iraq, Martin Van Creveld, the Middle East, Islamism, Bush and many other topics. An excerpt:
“Military-military relations are best, but Congress dislikes them. In the case of Turkmenistan, we had established such relations, but then we were told to break them off because of the dictatorial regime there. The same thing happened in Kenya because the U.S. didn’t like President Moi [who stayed in office too long and didn’t curb corruption]. As for Musharraf in Pakistan, Zinni was told to break off relations with him when he seized power from the civilian government. At the request of senior officials Zinni later called Musharraf asking for assistance on several important matters. He helped us, but Washington didn’t want to do anything for him. Zinni had remarked about that to Musharraf, but Musharraf said that he had done things for us without recompense because it was the right thing to do. Military-to-military relations are an avenue to better relations and positive influence. It does not make sense to cut off contacts with the military because of some governmental action that the military has no part in or influence over. As one of his foreign military contacts asked after such a rupture, “When the police commit a human rights violation in the U.S., do you penalize your own military for it?”
Go read the whole thing.
April 19th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I have a great deal of respect for General Zinni, and I think that he has a lot of good ideas buried in here. Unfortunately, the parts of his ideas that are getting the real attention are the ones where he has no apparent clue.
It’s fine to criticize Rumsfeld, as an example, for his abrasive management style or his unwillingness to concede mistakes in any but broad terms, but how does he think that changing the SecDef is suddenly going to make other countries more willing to work with us? And why should Rumsfeld be tagged with CPA, which Rumsfeld, IIRC, opposed?
General Zinni’s disagreements on the followup to the war are predicated on plans from when he was at CENTCOM. The problem is that the political situation, the driver for the war, had changed. We were now trying to build a democracy in Iraq, rather than to build a stable Iraq. This changes the plans (for one thing, more troops past the minimum required to keep the country intact are actually a detriment, because they stir up the locals to resist the resented intrusion).
The general has some excellent points about building a democracy (full occupation, build the institutions, then have elections for progressively more important offices) with which I completely agree. The problem is how to implement them. If we were to undertake this program, it would eventually have to include Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia (and possibly Yemen and Pakistan and some other outliers). That would take, as a rough estimate, on the order of 4-5 million troops sustained for 5 years, followed by 2-3 million troops for another 15 years. (Or, using the British model combined with not giving a fig whether our actions are decent or not — that is, simply using local constabularies paired with brutal retribution enacted by American troops for any violations — we could cut this troop strength down somewhat, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead locals.) In any case, we would need a massive draft for a long time, and a massive increase in spending on the military, and I don’t see either option as being politically viable. (I could support some versions of this, but I would stand nearly alone, I’m sure.)
So what realistic solutions does General Zinni propose to the big political problems? Sadly, so far as I can see at the moment, none at all.
April 20th, 2006 at 2:02 am
Hi Jeff,
I can’t really disagree with anything you said here, except on the magnitude of the Iraqi deployment ( we needed more troops but not a WWI sized army).
Rumsfeld was put in as SecDef to shake things up because the brass basically seized control of the budget and procurement process during the 90’sand even ( under Colin Powell) became the deciding voice on whether or not the U.S. would use military power. That’s not their call – they are there to give their best professional advice and that’s it.
Moreover their near-peer competitor planning has been taken to such an extreme that we can’t do other kinds of war very efficiently. At times, there isn’t enough concern with making sure the goldplated platforms actually work for the troops who will use them.It was time for a strong hand at OSD who knew how the insider games were played