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"We've failed thus far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he said, "I don't have confidence we will do it now. I believe the only way it will work now is for the Iraqis themselves to somehow take charge and turn things around. Our policy, strategy, tactics, etc., are still screwed up."As the General says, "I'm not saying there aren't parts of the world that don't need their ass kicked," Afghanistan seemed pretty obvious to me, but Iraq was different and maybe the brutality of Saddam should have been enough. Were the 9/11 attacks enough of a reason to abandon realpolitik for good?
Zinni's passage from obedient general to outspoken opponent began in earnest in the unlikeliest of locations, the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was there in Nashville in August 2002 to receive the group's Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Award, recognition for his 35 years in the Marine Corps.
Vice President Dick Cheney also was there, delivering a speech on foreign policy. Sitting on the stage behind the vice president, Zinni grew increasingly puzzled. He had endorsed Bush and Cheney two years earlier, just after he retired from his last military post as chief of the Central Command.
He was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
Cheney's claim baffling
Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As Central Command chief, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at CENTCOM, I watched the intelligence, and never--not once--did it say, `He has WMD.'"
So early in 1999, Zinni ordered that plans be devised for the possibility of the U.S. military having to occupy Iraq. Under the code name Desert Crossing, the resulting document called for a nationwide civilian occupation authority, with offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. That plan contrasts sharply, he notes, with the reality of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation power, which for months this year had almost no presence outside Baghdad--an absence that some Army generals say has increased their burden in Iraq.
Listening to the administration officials testify that day, Zinni began to suspect that his careful plans had been disregarded. Concerned, he later called a general at Central Command's headquarters and asked, "Are you guys looking at Desert Crossing?" The answer, he recalls, was, "What's that?"
The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist, "neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand.
The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.-Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, 1910.
War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element....
Are we, in blind obedience to primitive instincts and old prejudices, enslaved by the old catchwords and that curious indolence which makes the revision of old ideas unpleasant, to duplicate indefinitely on the political and economic side a condition from which we have liberated ourselves on the religious side? Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom -- spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure -- to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed and the constant defeat of all those aims which men, in their sober hours, know to be alone worthy of sustained endeavor?
MOYERS: How can anyone, millions of stockholders, how can they trust those investments if they can't trust the information the accounting firms are giving them, the executives are saying. I mean, that's the whole essence of...-NOW with Bill Moyers
STEPHEN MOORE: I agree with that. And certainly I'm not saying that there aren't crooks out there and I'm not saying that there isn't corruption that took place. And I do believe that those people who engaged in willing fraud should be put in jail. What I'm arguing with is this idea that there is a culture of corruption in corporate America and I reject that.
ALAN PATRICOFF: I would agree with you. I think it's really a shame that corporate America is being given this image of hoodwinking people, of corruption running through business. that's not really the case.
I mean I've been investing in companies for 30, 40 years and the number of fraud examples have been so minuscule. And what really has happened and people should distinguish it, the economy in the last couple of years has gotten very soft. And that has accounted for a lot of the declines taking place in the market.
This has now been exacerbated by a few, a handful, who knows what the number is going to be, of companies that have the appearance of things that have been done improperly.
Most companies have very little problem with their system. Does it need improvement? Absolutely. But that needed improvement before this last round.
WILLIAM LERACH: ...you think over 900 accounting restatements in four years indicates a few bad apples? Do you realize that the companies on the NASDAQ wrote off $148 billion of previously reported profits. The companies that lead the NASDAQ never made an honest dollar of profit in the last five years of the 1990s.
ALAN PATRICOFF: That's not true.
WILLIAM LERACH: It is true, and the Wall Street Journal reported it, that every dollar of profit reported on that so called new economy index was wiped out by subsequent accounting write downs. The accounting in this country has been phony and false and it's misled investors and it's cost them trillions of dollars.
CAROLYN BRANCATO: I think going forward the problem is that there are certainly some areas of fraud that need to be rooted out. But I think the issue is that the corporations need to start taking corporate governance seriously, entirely through the organization. The board has been too collegial in most cases. The issue of managers and...
MOYERS: By collegial you mean...?
CAROLYN BRANCATO: Agreeing...
MOYERS: Cronies.
CAROLYN BRANCATO: Well, agreeing with the CEO...
MALE: Cozy.
MOYERS: Cozy.
CAROLYN BRANCATO: Cozy maybe.
MOYERS: Looking the other way?
...Globalization does not mean an American cultural provocation as it may mean to Europeans. This is a war that was lost a long time ago. To the intellectuals here, Globalization means an increasing feeling of lagging behind and being unable to keep up. While the Europeans are threatened with second-class status in a globalized world, the peoples here see their case as completely hopeless. This means that Globalization increases their feelings of fragility, inferiority and megalomania and adds to a sense of alienation and insecurity. Suicidal behaviour might be just an expression of being completely lost. If the West is the great symbolic enemy for many people here, the secondary importance of the West to the USA makes it no longer a symbol of strength or weakness. And once a symbol no longer exists, only the absolute loss can follow.- Between subservience and megalomania
The matter should, in fact, be dealt with on the same symbolic level. It requires some thought and a real alternative answer through an ideological and political approach. The cultural and economical aid to the Islamic peoples shall remain meaningless until an ideological and political approach has been developed. More accurately, it could be said that aid will remain meaningless as long as the international preference for Israel continues to present an image of continuing colonial aggression and increasing contempt for the Islamic peoples. Strictly speaking, for the peoples of the Orient, Israel is not an oriental country but an instrument of the West...
THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.-Glen Reynolds
And read this piece by Amir Taheri on the Iraqi "resistance," which notes Palestinian terror connections by the Iraqi insurgents, and features a Palestinian "journalist" egging them on.
These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don't deserve a state of their own. It's not clear that they even deserve to keep what they've got. I don't think this means that the Bush Administration should be taking direct action against them -- closing off their funding via shutting down Saddam is a good start, and a policy of slow strangulation directed at Arafat and his fellow terrorists is probably the most politic at the moment. We need to try to squeeze off the EU funding, too, especially now that it's been admitted to be part of a proxy war by the EU not just against Israel, but America.
The people in Israel also have their own set of rules for worshipping you,
which they say you passed on to them. And they claim that you look more
favorably upon them than anyone else. This has always caused a lot of hard
feelings because a lot of other groups figure that they're your favorites.
(It must be hard being a father figure.) Israel's claim that they're Number
One has also made some people wonder this: If the Jews, after all they've
been through over the centuries, are really your chosen people, what do you
do to somebody you don't like?
Anyway the Jews and their Moslem neighbors--both of whom claim your complete
support--have been going at it for about 30 years. But I don't think they'll
ever equal Ireland's record because they'll all eventually have nuclear
bombs. Boy, when they start throwing those around, will you have a crowd
showing up.
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Perle and Frum lay out a bold program to defend America--and to win the war on terror. Among the topics this book addresses:
--why the United States risks its security if it submits to the authority of the United Nations
--why France and Saudi Arabia have to be treated as adversaries, not allies, in the war on terror
--why the United States must take decisive action against Iran--now
--what to do in North Korea if negotiations fail
--why everything you read in the newspapers about the Israeli-Arab dispute is wrong
--how our government must be changed if we are to fight the war on terror to victory--not just stalemate
--where the next great terror threat is coming from--and what we can do to protect ourselves
An End to Evil will define the conservative point of view on foreign policy for a new generation--and shape the agenda for the 2004 presidential-election year and beyond. With a keen insiders' perspective on how our leaders are confronting--or not confronting--the war on terrorism, David Frum and Richard Perle make a convincing argument for why the toughest line is the safest line.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 12:06 AM on December 31, 2003