Another Military Man for the Bush Administration to Insult Of course, there was already a round of it towards Anthony Zinni as has been recounted by others. But a new interview with Zinni in the San Diego Union Tribune has been posted. Some excerpts: What should we have done, then, in your view? Continue to contain them. Containment worked. The president has said containment didn't work. I disagree. First of all, containment worked with the Soviet Union, the Cubans, the North Koreans, thus far. Containment was done at very low cost. In Centcom, in my time there when we had the dual containment policy, there were less troops on a day-to-day basis in the entire theater than than report to work at the Pentagon every day in the entire theater. But if Saddam was preserving a capability – I wouldn't call it a capability. What would you call it? I would call it a framework to restart building a capability. It was not capable of threatening us. It was neither imminent nor grave and gathering. A framework to restart. Didn't it represent something of a risk to permit that to continue indefinitely? Obviously Saddam had some future intent. It would present a risk if you weren't able to monitor it. Let's say the program moved beyond the framework and he decided to weaponize it. I can't think of any place on earth we had a more concentrated look, intelligence focus. Whether it's satellite, whether it's communication intercept and everything else. If he suddenly decided to take those missiles and weaponize them, if suddenly that L29 program would have flown unmanned at greater ranges, we would have seen it. And actually we had a bank of options short of war that we could have taken. What problems do you see in the war option that was taken? In my mind, several problems. One, it was going to distract us from the business in Afghanistan, which it has. Warlordism is back. There is insufficient money and resources in there for Karzai to really establish himself as more than the mayor of Kabul. We've gotten distracted from the real war. In addition to that, much like Bush 41 understood, we inherited Baghdad. You can't go in there without a plan, without understanding the scope of the problem: political, security, economic, humanitarian, reconstruction on the ground. We had no plan for that. And it was all knowable. We had actually worked up this. I think that although the military part of this was brilliant in its execution, to Tommy Frank's credit, there were insufficient troops on the ground. ... You said all of the generals were against this war and the civilians were for it. What were the Chiefs of Staff doing? Weren't they doing the planning? How come that stuff that you're recommending wasn't done? Look, when I was the commander in chief of Central Command, Gen. Hugh Shelton was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He required all the service chiefs and all the CINCS, to read "Dereliction of Duty," written by H.R. McMaster, a young Army major now colonel. It talked about the negligence of the joint chiefs during Vietnam who all knew what was being done was wrong in many aspects. Not only the strategy and policy in Vietnam, but also the way we were fighting the war, decisions like individual rotations rather than unit rotation. And we not only were forced to read the book and told to read it, we had a meeting in Washington where he brought in young McMasters, who addressed us about that negligence. So you ask why? It's a good question. There's going to be another dereliction of duty written in the future. So you're suggesting the administration came in and said this is what we're going to do, shut up and do it? The worst-kept secret in Washington is that as soon as this administration came in there was talk about taking down Iraq from day one. It's the worst-kept secret in Washington. There were Cabinet meetings where the deputy secretary of defense and others were pushing this. And certainly after 9/11 it was even more intense.