Last year, in praising Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, President Bush sounded very confident in Zinni’s judgment. Bush told reporters that he and Dick Cheney “both trust General Zinni.”
I have a hunch Bush and Cheney would offer a different assessment this morning.
Zinni, who served as Bush’s hand-picked special envoy to the Middle East up until last year, offered a stunningly harsh critique of the administration and its Iraq strategy (or lack thereof) on last night’s 60 Minutes. He didn’t pull any punches.
“There has been poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it’s time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it’s been a failure.”
Zinni spent more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor.
Now, in a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called “Battle Ready,” Zinni has handed up a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq.
In the book, Zinni writes: “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.”
Zinni was relaying an assessment that Bush critics have believed all along, so in one sense, there was nothing new here. But Zinni’s comments carry enormous credibility because of his personal integrity and the respect he’s earned throughout the armed forces.
How, exactly, will the White House smear machine dismiss Zinni as a “disgruntled” ex-employee?
For 60 Minutes, the White House didn’t even try.
60 Minutes asked Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy Wolfowitz to respond to Zinni’s remarks. The request for an interview was declined.
Just as well; I’m not sure how they could have responded anyway.
But the sure-to-follow attacks on Zinni will be tough to spin, if not impossible. The usual strategy — employed on too many occasions — probably won’t work, if it’s even tried at all.
When Rand Beers, a special assistant to Bush for combating terrorism at the National Security Council, came forward to criticize the way in which the White House was ignoring the war on terrorism, he was dismissed as a “partisan.” When Paul O’Neill, Bush’s treasury secretary, came forward to say Bush decided to invade Iraq shortly after his inauguration, he was dismissed as “disgruntled.” When Richard Clarke, Bush’s counterterrorism czar, came forward to condemn the White House wholesale foreign policy failures, he was dismissed as “out of the loop.”
What do they have on Zinni? I guess we’ll find out.