Top military brass incensed over Bush war plan failures

America's leading retired military officials have been tearing the Bush administration's head off over its Iraq policy. Retired officers now say that not enough troops were deployed to prevent postwar chaos.

"I argued on the air during the war, that the coalition did not have enough troops to finish the conventional campaign against the Iraqi Army and simultaneously disperse to centers of regional and tribal power to establish the safe and secure environment needed to support reconstruction," says Gen. Meigs, a retired four star general, former commander U.S. forces in Europe who appeared on MSNBC during the war. "I think that position has been born out by events."

"Dismissing the entire Iraqi Army en masse after the war ... was a major mistake. We should have done what the Germans did with the East German Army after reunification [in 1990]. Send away all over the rank of major and sift through the rest for the ones that could be used to form a new Army, then use them to help maintain a secure environment as part of our effort."

Former drug czar (a losing general in the war on drugs :) Barry McCaffrey said

The more important and lasting errors made by the administration was the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and send its entire strength, including Republican Guard, fedayeen militia units and senior officers, back to their home villages without vetting them or creating POW camps.

"This is a 400,000 man army that disappeared into thin air, was never engaged or defeated on the battlefield," says McCaffrey. "That was a stupid thing to do. We should have kept every officer we captured; we should have kept every member of Republican Guard and every fedayeen until we could finger print and get a digital photo of them, releasing them knowing where they live. But we had no troops to guard and process them, just as we had insufficient troops to guard key buildings, to garrison key towns and to search for weapons of mass destruction."

"The war plan was pushed on Tommy Franks with insufficient forces for Rumsfeld?s own ideological reasons," says McCaffrey. "He personally sat on the army?s deployment schedule and made sure the four or five divisions that should have been deployed never got there. And he and his people denigrate the army and its top generals in a way that suggest they pay no attention at all to them."

Also retired Marine General and former mideast envoy Anthony Zinni said that

"I'm suggesting," Zinni said, "that either the [prewar] intelligence was so bad and flawed--and if that's the case, then somebody's head ought to roll for that--or the intelligence was exaggerated or twisted in a way to make a more convenient case to the American people."

Zinni raised the issue that Bush might have purposefully misled the public and not shared with it the true reason for the war: "If there's a strategic decision for taking down Iraq, if it's the so-called neoconservative idea that taking apart Iraq and creating a model democracy, or whatever it is, will change the equation in the Middle East, then make the [public] case based on that strategic decision....I think it's a flawed--like the domino theory--it's a flawed strategic thought or concept....But if that's the reason for going in, that's the case the American people ought to hear. They ought to make their judgment and determine their support based on what the motivation is for the attack."

Earlier in the month, he addressed a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association. There he let loose. Reflecting the views of high-ranking U.S. military officials who were dubious about launching a war against Iraq and skeptical about the occupation that would follow, Zinni accused the Bush crowd of having not been ready for the challenges to come after defeating the Iraqi army. "We're in danger of failing," he noted, because the Bush administration had not readied itself for what would follow the initial military engagement. "We fought one idiot here [in Iraq], just now," he said. "Ohio State beat Slippery Rock 62 to 0. No shit! You know! But we weren't ready for that team that came onto the field at the end of that three-week victory." He went on:

"Right now, in a place like Iraq, you're dealing with Jihadists that are coming in to raise hell, crime on the streets that's rampant, ex-Ba'athists that still running around, and the potential now for this country to fragment: Shi'ia on Shi'ia, Shi'ia on Sunni, Kurd on Turkomen. It's a powder keg. I just got back from Jordan. I talked to a number of Iraqis there. And what I hear scares me even more that what I read in the newspaper. Resources are needed, a strategy is needed, a plan. This is a different kind of conflict. War fighting is one element of it."

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."

"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."

...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. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries--our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. We swore never again would we allow it to happen. And I ask you, is it happening again? And you're going to have to answer that question, just like the American people are."

Posted by HongPong at September 27, 2003 08:17 PM
Listed under Iraq .