|
Somebody asked for a link in GD this a.m. and I already had it on my notepad. So here's the link. It's a good read. http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=2208&from_page=../index.cfm
May 22, 2004
Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.) Remarks at CDI Board of Directors Dinner, May 12, 2004
I think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I believe it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not sure ... but at some point I heard him say that "containment did not work." That's not true.
I was responsible, along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to his two successors, that were my predecessors, myself, and my successor, General Franks, up until the war, we were responsible for containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about that containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 accepting the UN resolution to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the UN resolution, and not after the war, going to Baghdad, breaking the coalition, ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly saw would be a burden on us, our military, our treasure, and would break relations around the region, and would put him outside what he considered his international legitimacy for doing this - the resolution by which he operated and conducted the war, and the resolution by which we established the sanctions.
Administering those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought. In the entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day we had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at the Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On any given day ... on an average day in CENTCOM, we had about 23,000 troops, soup to nuts. Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that with these 23,000 troops, the whole region. To top it off, those troops were not assigned to CENTCOM. In other words, that structure wasn't created to be part of CENTCOM, like the troops are in the Pacific Command or in the European Command, these were troops that were on rotation. They came from other places, from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific region. And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never created a structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we could up the rheostat or lower it when we needed to. |
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
