Retired General Anthony Zinni spoke to an audience of 250 people at Montpelier's Unitarian-Universalist Church Wednesday night. While he has been in the news in recent years for his criticism of the Bush Administration's handling of the war in Iraq, his discussion Wednesday ranged far beyond the war, and was primarily concerned with how the United States can exist and be effective in the world as it now exists.
Zinni's thesis was that we are living with the results of the third great global transformation of the Twentieth Century. The first was after World War I, the second was after World War II, and the third was at the end of the Cold War. As Zinni put it, "The world did not change on 9/11, it changed in 1989-90 when the Soviet Union dissolved."
General Zinni was first commissioned as a brigadier general at the time the Berlin Wall fell, and he recalled travelling to Berlin for his orientation, a process as disorienting for the trainers as for the trainees. Zinni and the other new general officers were taken on an unauthorized tour of East Berlin by a lieutenant who drove right through Checkpoint Charlie, now unmanned, and around the streets of the Potemkin village that was East Berlin, before returning with a sledge hammer to break off pieces of the Wall as souvenirs. What Zinni learned in that process, and the years that followed, was that, "We are living in a changed world that we don't understand, and which we are ill-equipped to deal with."
He also learned that Bush 41's New World Order did not bring the stability that was anticipated and promised, due to forces as diverse as globalization, revolutions in technology and communications, and the rise of regional hegemonies, and the conclusion he draws is that "Instability is the primary enemy."
The audience included Adjutant General Michael Dubie and defeated Congressional candidate Martha Rainville. While Zinni's subject was broader than the war in Iraq, he received questions on the war, and on the Military Commissions Act.
A couple of things. First, we went off track in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, which made the problem worse. By invading Iraq we got involved in the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Second, the war was not conducted right. Third, to put it charitably, the administration abused the intelligence. Finally, "we made the same mistake as in Vietnam: if you have a strategic vision, don't hide it from the public. Once you lose the credibility of your rationale it's very hard to recover from it."
What do we do about Iraq now? Admitting that is answer is unlikely to be popular with a Montpelier audience, Zinni echoed Colin Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule: "We broke it, now we own it." He said that one option is to get out, but that we'll be back in in three to four months, once it turns into Afghanistan. The answer, in Zinni's view, is not to get out or to keep doing what hasn't been working. The answer is an integrated government that can implement military and political measures and provide social services.
When asked about the Military Commissions Act, Zinni's answer was straightforward: "If you don't want it done to your sons or daughters, you don't do it to anyone else."
In answer to the question of what we, as individuals can do, Zinni offered a three-ooint prescription;
First, "Do not reward politics as usual."
"Why," he asked, "Do we accept a political system that brushes aside competence?" refering to the decisions by Mark Warner and Colin Powell not to seek the presidency.
