|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Gen. Zinni: Rumsfeld Should Resign
Retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni says Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should resign for his performance during the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" this weekend, Zinni - the former head of CENTCOM - said others should follow Rumsfeld's lead, including "those who have been responsible for the planning, for overriding all the efforts that were made in planning before that, [and] those who stood by and allowed this to happen, that didn't speak out." Zinni added, "There are appropriate ways within the system you can speak out, at congressional hearings and otherwise. I think they have to be held accountable." Zinni appeared on the Sunday news program to promote his new book, "Battle For Peace," which lays out his case for believing that the Bush administration gravely erred in going to war in Iraq. The general said he had warned as early as 1998 - during the Clinton administration - that an attack on Iraq was not needed and would have serious consequences.
Story Continues Below
"I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq - which could happen if this isn't done carefully - is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now ... I don't think these questions have been thought through or answered," he said. Regarding Iraq, Zinni said, "I think we are paying the price for the lack of credible planning, or the lack of a plan. We're throwing away 10 years worth of planning, in effect, for underestimating the situation we were going to get into, for not adhering to the advice that was being given to us by others, and, I think, getting distracted from Afghanistan and the war on terrorism that we were committed to when we took on this adventure." Zinni stated that Saddam was never a real threat to the United States. "I'd be the first to say we had to assume he had WMD left over that wasn't accounted for: artillery rounds, chemical rounds, a SCUD missile or two. But these things, over time, degrade. "These things did not present operational or strategic level threats at best. Plus, we were watching Saddam with an army that had caved in. It was nothing like the Gulf War army. It was a shell of its former self. We knew we could go through it quickly. We'd stripped away his air defenses. He was at our mercy. We had air superiority ... So to say that this threat was imminent or grave and gathering, seemed like a great exaggeration to me." Zinni feels that despite all that, we can't cut and run. "... we can't let [Iraq] fall apart. It is part of a whole myriad of issues that we have regarding stability in the Middle East. We're committed to it now. We have to see this through." On intelligence, Zinni stated: "You know, the number of insurgents, so-called insurgents, although it's a mixed bag of problems that we face, could be dealt with if the people turned against them. If, like General Casey said a week or so ago, 99.9 percent of the people are opposed to the violence and the perpetrators of these violence; well, all those people have to do is call up on the phone and tell you where the insurgents are, tell you in the two to four provinces that everybody said this is concentrated in where the issues are, where the problems are, where the people that are doing this are, and you wouldn't need much more than you have right now. "And the security forces and the Iraqis would be able to handle it. We're not fighting the Waffen SS here. You know, we're fighting a bunch of ragtag people with AK-47s and IEDs and RPGs. They can be policed up if the people turn against them. We haven't won the hearts and minds yet." Despite these dire summations, Zinni felt that all the news isn't bad. "The ... good news in all this is [that] the potential for Iraq to come out of this better off is there, where there was no hope under Saddam."
He felt the media isn't to blame for the lack of reporting on the good new from Iraq: "I think America's media is being made a scapegoat for what's going on out there. At last count, I think something like 80 journalists have been killed in Iraq." Zinni noted that it is hard for reporters to get outside the green zone without risking their lives, "or risk kidnapping, at a minimum, to get the story. And it's hard to blame the media for no good stories when the security situation is such that they can't even go out and get the good stories without risking their lives." He stated that President Bush should "fess up" to his mistakes. "I think the president of the United States ought to certainly say that there were mistakes made at each of those levels. In some cases, these were presented to him. It may not be necessarily the case that he was wrong. He was given bad information," he said. Zinni went on to add that Saddam was being successfully held at bay before hostilities began. "You know, we had less troops on a day-to-day basis out there than go to work at the Pentagon every day doing this ... These were troops that rotated in and out. "We had allies out there who helped foot the bill for this, $300 million dollars to $500 million dollars a year supporting us with bases, supporting us with overflights, supporting us with assistance in kind, joining us in places like Somalia and the Balkans when we required coalition troops. I thought the containment worked remarkably well, and it was a tribute to our troops and how they handled it." Zinni described the Democracy process: "An election doesn't equal democracy. Think about it. We need an educated electorate. We need political parties that are transparent, that people understand their platforms, that compete in a fair process. We have to have a governmental system that people are voting into, and they have to understand that, and then you can have elections. We've sort of reversed the process. "Look what's happened in Iraq. We've had three elections now, and we don't have a government yet that can stand up. There aren't people that, I think, really understood what they voted for," he said. Zinni then went on to discuss Iraq's needs: "It's not just democracy," he said. "It's economic development. It's social reform. This takes time, takes an investment from the stable part of the world and the unstable part of the world to establish these."
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2012 NewsMax.Com |