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  Following the departure of the UNSCOM inspectors and the Desert Fox strike, Saddam became much more aggressive toward the planes still enforcing the no-fly zones. Nearly every other day, his air defense units would fire on coalition aircraft, or his Air Force would attempt to lure the planes into missile range. In response, the U.S. unleashed attacks on the entire Iraqi air defense system, resulting in significant losses in Iraqi Air Defense Command weapons, radars, and command and control assets. This attack-counterattack routine lasted from the end of Desert Fox (December 1998) until the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom (March 2003). Coalition forces never lost an aircraft and Saddam’s air defense forces suffered greatly for his folly.

  DESERT CROSSING

  Tony Zinni continues:

  Desert Fox accomplished everything militarily that we wanted it to accomplish. But it also brought political consequences that none of us expected. These totally surprised me.

  Soon after we turned off Desert Fox, we started to get really interesting reports from inside Iraq — from diplomatic missions and other people friendly to us — indicating that the attack had badly shaken the regime. They actually seemed shocked into paralysis.

  Although they’d had suspicions that we would hit them when the inspectors walked out, it turns out that the absence of visible preparations for the strike and the approach of Ramadan seem to have lulled them into a lackadaisical approach to their own preparations. Somebody put out the word to move the equipment and documents, the way they normally did; but nobody was in a hurry to do it; so they got caught with their pants down. And they totally didn’t expect us to take out the Ba’ath party headquarters and the intelligence headquarters — the “House of Pain,” as Iraqis called it, because of all the torturing that went on in there.

  For a time, they were so dazed and rattled they were virtually headless.

  After an attack, we could usually expect defiant rhetoric and all kinds of public posturing and bluster. But there was none of that. And there were reports that people had cheered when the “House of Pain” was hit.

  Some of us even began to wonder about the stability of the regime; and I began to hear stories (told to my Arab friends by senior officers in the Republican Guard) that there may have been a move against it if the bombing had lasted a little while longer.

  That we had really hurt them was confirmed again in January 1999, in Saddam’s yearly Army Day speech, when he viciously lashed out at all the other Arabs — blaming them for all the harm they had sanctioned, threatening reprisals, calling regional monarchs “throne dwarfs.” These were all people he hoped would feel sorry for him — or at least for his people. Showing such fury toward them was unheard of; it meant we’d hurt him really bad.

  All this got me thinking: What if we had actually tipped the scale here? What if we’d hit Saddam or his sons, and that had somehow spurred the people to rise up? What if the country imploded and we had to deal with the aftermath?

  Before Desert Fox, we’d looked at the possibility that we would have to execute the takedown of Saddam; but we always thought that would come after he attacked a neighbor or Israel, used WMD again on his own people, or committed some other atrocity so outrageous we’d have no choice but to go in there and turn over the regime.

  “But what if it just collapsed?” I began to ask myself.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out the answer to that: Somebody’d have to go in there to rebuild the country.

  “Who?” I asked myself.

  “As the CINC, I have a plan for militarily defeating Saddam. Doing that isn’t going to be hard. But after we defeat him, who takes care of reconstruction and all the attendant problems?”

  It was clear that we had to start looking hard at this possibility. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if we didn’t, we could find ourselves in deep trouble.

  “What we need to do,” I realized, “is come together and work out a comprehensive and joint plan. We need to get the other agencies of government — not only CENTCOM and the DOD [Department of Defense], but the CIA, the State Department, and their Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and USAID, and everyone else with something to contribute. And we’d also have to plan to bring in the UN, various NGOs, and Coalition members for this phase of the operation.”

  “Who’s doing this?” I asked myself.

  When I probed around Washington, I quickly learned that nobody was doing it; nor was there much interest in doing it.

  “Then we have to create interest,” I told myself. “We need to organize a conference, a seminar, or a war game that will spark people to generate an interagency plan for dealing with this issue. Out of this I can also develop a specifically CENTCOM plan, which would cover some of the more immediately practical issues.”

  I decided to organize a “war game” that presented several post-Saddam Iraq scenarios. The game — called “Desert Crossing”—was conducted in the Washington, D.C., area late in 1999 at Booz Allen, the contractor (who run secure games for the government); experts from all the relevant branches of government took part.

  The scenarios looked closely at humanitarian, security, political, economic, and other reconstruction issues. We looked at food, clean water, electricity, refugees, Shia versus Sunnis, Kurds versus the other Iraqis, Turks versus Kurds, and the power vacuum that would surely follow the collapse of the regime (since Saddam had pretty successfully eliminated any local opposition). We looked at all the problems the United States faces in 2003 trying to rebuild Iraq. And when it was over, I was starting to get a good sense of their enormous scope and to recognize how massive the reconstruction job would be.

  Desert Crossing gave us the ammunition we needed to define the post-Saddam problem, but that was only a start.

  “Well, who’s going to take the next step?” I asked.

  The answer: Nobody. There was no interest in Washington in pursuing it. Most of the participants in the game were sympathetic; but none had any charter to develop a plan. They were more than willing to help us define the problem, maybe learn a little bit about what needed to be done; but nobody was in a position to sign up to anything. Post-Saddam Iraq was simply too far down the priority list of any agency with a reason to be interested in the problem.

  You can’t really blame them for this. Nobody saw Iraq as a really pressing threat. Saddam’s military was down. Our policy was containment, the policy was succeeding, and we were whacking Saddam when he got out of line. At this stage of the game, there was a near zero likelihood that he could attack Kuwait, Iran, or Israel again. And there was no way he was going to initiate a serious attack against us, nor were we going to initiate anything major against him.

  Besides, we had other, more pressing crises to manage. We were working the Kosovo problem, the Bosnia problem, the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the drug problem in Colombia… India-Pakistan, Korea… and much of Africa was going to hell.

  So if you look at my inability to drum up interest in a post-Saddam Iraq in the light of what’s going on right now, you have to ask how they could have passed it up. But back then, it just didn’t seem high priority to anybody in Washington.

  You also have to keep in mind the structural barrier to getting anything like that done in Washington. In Washington, there is no one place, agency, or force that directs interagency cooperation. The only such cooperation is on an ad hoc person-to-person or group-to-group basis. So if you have a problem like putting Iraq back together after Saddam, that requires the joint work of many government agencies (not to mention international agencies — NGOs and the UN), there’s nowhere to start.

  I could go to DOD. But where does DOD go? Possibly to the President’s National Security Adviser. He or she might then interest the President. Or possibly someone will take the issue to a cabinet meeting and interest the President that way.

  Failing that, you’re in limbo. There’s no way you can move the bureaucracy without action from the top.

  Of course the problem did not go
away. I knew then there was a very good chance it would come back to haunt us. Which meant that if Saddam’s regime did collapse, “somebody” was going to get stuck with putting Humpty back together again.

  I knew who that “somebody” was likely to be. It was “us”—the military. I knew that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were far from the best solution, but we would have to do until we came up with something better.

  So I said to my guys, “We need to start planning on this.” And they did. But by then we were well into 2000 and I was coming to the end of my tour. And when I left CENTCOM (in mid-2000), the plan was nowhere near materializing.

  I’m not sure where it went after I left.

  As far as I can tell, the plan was pigeonholed. And by the time Iraqi Freedom rolled around, nobody in CENTCOM had ever heard of it. There’s no longer any corporate memory of it.

  Meanwhile, we’re living through the fall of Saddam Hussein, and my concerns have come true. Since nobody in Washington had seriously planned for the consequences of the fall, the military — by default — got stuck with the nation building that followed it.

  On February 11, 2003, a month before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Zinni was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of post-Saddam reconstruction planning. He followed a panel of Defense and State Department officials who’d just been heavily criticized by the committee for their obvious lack of serious attention to that critical phase.

  In his own testimony, Zinni recounted the lessons learned from Desert Crossing, and continued by relating from his own numerous past experiences that defeating hostile forces militarily does not necessarily mean victory. In Zinni’s view, victory only comes when the defeated people see that they have a livable future and that they have some say in it.

  He first learned this lesson as a young lieutenant in Vietnam.

  CHAPTER TWO

  12,000 MILES FROM PHILADELPHIA

  Tony Zinni never forgot the first time somebody shot at him.

  It was at the end of April, in 1967. He was a green U.S. Marine first lieutenant, barely a month in Vietnam, where he was assigned as an adviser to the elite South Vietnamese Marines, that nation’s most effective fighting force.

  The advisers’ job was not to give the Vietnamese Marines tactical advice (they had more fighting experience than most Americans, and it was their country). Rather, the obligation of the advisers was to apply American air and artillery firepower when that became necessary (which was frequently), and to provide American logistics, coordination with American units, and American intelligence. The Vietnamese were weakest in these areas. The job of the advisers, in other words, was to make the Vietnamese system work.

  As the most junior adviser, Zinni was not assigned to one unit, the usual practice, but sent wherever he was needed. In his words, he was “the utility infielder.” He bounced around from unit to unit.

  In his eyes, this was not at all a bad thing. He got a chance to see all kinds of different people and places, and soak up a wealth of varied experiences.

  In his first advisory assignment, he’d spent a couple of weeks in the tidal swamps of the Rung Sat—“the Forest of Death”—near the Mekong Delta. Now he had been ordered to Binh Dinh Province in the northern part of the II CTZ (Corps Tactical Zone), where he was to take up duties with the Vietnamese Marines 5th Battalion, replacing an adviser returning home on emergency leave.

  The 5th Battalion had long been heavily involved in an operation the Americans were calling “Pershing.” Its aim was to use the U.S. 1st Cavalry and the VNMC (Vietnamese Marine Corps) to root out and destroy the communist infrastructure: to clear and pacify, to interdict infiltration routes, and to reeducate the people (“win hearts and minds”). Pershing took up the better part of 1967.

  It took Zinni three days to travel from the Rung Sat to Binh Dinh. The last leg was by helicopter. He arrived at the battalion position at sunset.

  The helo landed in a dry rice paddy next to a tree line, where he was met by Jim Laney, the 5th Battalion junior adviser, now filling in for his boss on emergency leave. Laney was a mustang, a onetime enlisted man who had received a meritorious commission as an officer.

  He led Zinni through the tree line and into the battalion command post, a half-destroyed hut (it was roofless, and the wall facing the line of troops and paddy area had been completely blown away). As they walked past the Marine positions, Zinni noticed that they were digging in at the edge of the paddies just a few meters from the hut, obviously getting ready for serious action. The battalion had been conducting a parallel sweep on both sides of a vast east-west open rice paddy complex.

  “We’ve been in continuous contact since we began the sweep,” Laney explained, “and they’ve attacked us every night. They consider this area to be theirs. They’ve owned it for a long time. We’re intruders.

  “You’ll move across the paddy area tomorrow morning,” he continued, “to join the battalion executive officer who has two companies on the other side.”

  “Why can’t I just cross the paddy now?” Zinni asked.

  Laney laughed. “You won’t get ten yards before they pick you off. In the morning, the Marines will clear the area just to our west. Then you can cross.”

  Zinni stepped into the roofless, three-sided hut and met the battalion commander, a tough but friendly and wise old Marine major named Nha, and a combat legend. He gave Zinni a warm welcome, insisting that he join him for chow.

  Later, as they ate, a full moon left an eerie glow across the paddies. After dinner, as Zinni was settling into a corner of the hut for the night, Laney reminded him that they surely would be hit; he should be ready.

  That got young Zinni’s attention. Excited to be getting into a close-quarters firefight for the first time, he carefully laid out his M-16 and harness, figuring out how he would roll out of his poncho liner, grab his rifle and gear, and come up ready to shoot.

  Sure enough, around midnight, the whole area erupted with fire.

  Zinni bolted out of a deep sleep and spun into action, surprising himself with how quickly he rolled, grabbed the gear, and was down in a shooting position ready for action. There was one problem. It was dark as a coalpit in hell. What happened to the full moon? He heard the others on the radio and the return fire, but he couldn’t see a thing, not even tracers.

  He shouted to Laney: “Can you see anything? I can’t.”

  “You’re facing the wrong way,” Laney yelled back over the firing.

  Zinni then realized that his planned “roll” into action had been in the wrong direction and he was facing the back wall of the hut. Red-faced, he crawled around. Major Nha was laughing sympathetically; he felt for the new guy.

  Anyhow, Zinni’s embarrassment passed quickly when it hit him that rounds were whizzing overhead and slamming into the back walls. He could clearly see the enemy muzzle flashes and the outgoing tracer fire of the Marines.

  In time, he would develop into an experienced veteran who could remain focused in the madness of a firefight. The sounds and flashes from the weapons would tell him what types were firing, at what distances, and how many there were. But at this point, all he heard was a cacophony of noises, flashes, and blasts.

  After about twenty minutes, the firing trailed off and eventually ceased. The others crawled back under their poncho liners, but Zinni was still too excited to sleep. This was his first experience with a close exchange of fire. He was standing at the front of the hut, gazing out across the moonlit paddies and thinking about the attack, when a single round cracked, zinged right between his legs, and slammed into the hardened mud base on the hut floor. “Oh, shit!” he realized. “I shouldn’t be standing up!”

  He dove back into the hut and slipped under his poncho liner. The next morning at first light his Vietnamese cowboy,[7] who had witnessed this adventure, handed him a cup of steaming coffee and the spent round he’d dug out of the floor. “Keep it as a reminder not to be
stupid,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Zinni replied, meaning it.

  Meanwhile, the scouts and lead units had already started forward, and Major Nha determined it was clear enough for Zinni, his cowboy, and his radio operator to cross over to join the other half of the battalion on the south side of the paddies.

  After the linkup, the battalion executive officer provided Zinni with a running description in fluent English of the area and the operation.

  “The Vietnamese Marines have operated in Binh Dinh Province on and off for the last three years,” the executive officer (XO) explained as they moved out. “Our area of operations is on the Bong Son Plain, which starts at the coast of the South China Sea and spreads west into the foothills and mountains of the Central Highlands. It’s a critical area, with major seacoast cities, airfields, and ports; it’s a major rice-producing area, with many lakes and waterways; the principal north-south highway of Vietnam, Highway 1, runs through it; and it’s also the major food-producing area of the central region.

  “In 1965, the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) moved into the area and remains the primary American unit operating here.

  “This is a hard-core VC region; stay-behind cadres were left by Ho Chi Minh after the French Indochina War,” in violation of the peace treaty that divided Vietnam; “there are heavy concentrations of VC [Vietcong] sympathizers; and many homes and classrooms still have pictures of Ho Chi Minh. The dense forests and mountains in the western part of the province give sanctuary to the enemy and easy access from the Central Highlands near the Cambodian border to the populated areas on the coastal plain. You can expect almost continuous enemy sniping or hit-and-run attacks.”