Anthony Zinni

Anthony C. Zinni (born 1947) is a retired general in the United States Marine Corps. He was selected in 2002 to be a special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His role was to try to negotiate a peace settlement between the two sides.

Zinni graduated from Villanova University in 1965 with a degree in economics and recevied a commission as an infantry second lieutenant in the USMC. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam. According to Tommy Franks, Zinni learned fluent Vietnamese while in South Vietnam and learned to enjoy native desserts, including puppies and bananas.

His last position before retirement from the Armed Forces was as Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, responsible for all U.S. forces in a 25-country region, including the Middle East. He was succeeded by General Tommy Franks.

Opinions on 2003 invasion of Iraq

Before the invasion, Zinni said that US forces risked entering a "Bay of Goats", a reference to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

In May 2004, his memoir, coauthored with noted right-wing thriller and military writer Tom Clancy, was published. It featured heavy criticism of the planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and more specifically the post-battle planning. In a widely reported speech at a dinner in May 2004, he detailed 10 serious criticisms of the rationale and execution of the war, summarised below:

1. The war planners "misjudged the success of containment" - the existing policy of trade sanctions and maintaining troops in the area.
2. The "strategy was flawed" - the strategy being that invading, occupying, and setting up a new government in Iraq would help solve the broader conflicts in the Middle East. Zinni "couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move".
3. The administration "had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support". Zinni said that "the books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence (that supported the claims made to support the need for war) was not there."
4. The war planners failed "to internationalize the effort.", by gaining the support of allies or unambiguously gaining UN endorsement of an invasion.
5. The "fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task." Zinni clarified this in his speech to mean the broader task of creating a free, democratic, and functional Iraq.
6. The sixth mistake was "propping up and trusting the exiles". The exiles Zinni refers to are groups like the Iraqi National Congress and its controversial leader Ahmed Chalabi.
7. Zinni criticised the "lack of planning" - not so much for the military confrontation, the planning of which he praised fulsomely, but for the post-war stablization and reconstruction of Iraq.
8. "The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground". Zinni, in his former position, had devised a battle plan for conquering and occupying Iraq in the 1990's, which featured far more troops, as did alternative plans presented to Donald Rumsfeld before the war. The extra troops were needed to "freeze the security situation because we knew the chaos that would result once we uprooted an authoritarian regime like Saddam's".
9. "The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there." Zinni criticises what he views as the lack of staff, skills, experience, and clear structure in the Coalition Provisional Authority.
10. According to Zinni, "that ad hoc organization has failed", "leading to the 10th mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground". These bad decisions include the excessive zeal in "de-Baathification", removing people only peripherally involved in the Baath Party who were Baathists purely to be permitted to conduct their profession or business, the decision to disband the Iraqi army.

Similar criticisms had been made widely in innnumerable blogs, newspaper opinion columns, and by politicians, but Zinni's have been given attention because of their extra credibility through his job experience.

References

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• Text of Zinni's May 12, 2004 speech (http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2208)
• American Soldier by Tommy Franks, Malcolm McConnell, ReganBooks, 2004 ISBN 0060731583