[retired General Anthony] Zinni displayed little confidence in Bush and his aides. He said that their Iraq endeavor has landed the United States into the middle of assorted "culture wars" in the Middle East. "We don't understand that culture," he remarked. "I've spent the last 15 years of my life in this part of the world. And I'll tell you, every time I hear...one of the dilettantes back here speak about this region of the world, they don't have a clue. They don't understand what makes them tick. They don't understand where they are in their own history. They don't understand what our role is....We are great at dealing with the tactical problems--the killing and the breaking. We are lousy at solving the strategic problems; having a strategic plan, understanding about regional and global security and what it takes to weld that and to shape it and to move forward."
Do you think Zinni is angry over the war? He did get worked up as he ended his speech:
"We should be...extremely proud of what our people did out there....It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that's being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they're insignificant statistically." (Perhaps he had in mind the comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made in June, when he played down attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, "You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month; there's going to be violence in a big city.") Zinni continued: "When we put [our enlisted men and women] in harm's way, it had better count for something, It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out."
Brain fart? That's not quite a military term. But those are fighting words. And Zinni practically counseled his audience to rebel against the Bush administration. U.S. troops, he said, "should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting--our generals will take care of that--but for the aftermath and winning that war. (David Corn Nation)
