Former commander calls for new military-civilian planning organization
Problems in Iraq were realized years ago, but government did not force interagency planning, says retired Marine general.
The former chief of U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that the problems now occurring in Iraq were evident as far back as 1999 and called for the creation of a new independent government organization to integrate military and civilian planning.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who left CENTCOM in 2000, said he organized a classified war game in 1999 to examine what problems would be encountered if Iraq were invaded and what would be required to deal with those problems. Zinni, also a former U.S. peace envoy to the Middle East, gave the keynote speech Tuesday at a forum in Washington hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"It brought out all the problems we're seeing now," said Zinni, who has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. "It shocked the heck out of me."
Zinni said he took the study back to CENTCOM and began working on a post-invasion plan for Iraq that included strategies for handling a political vacuum, reconstruction, social turmoil, economic problems, and even the potential of looting and revenge killings.
When he left CENTCOM, the "planning was pretty far ahead," Zinni said, but he does not know what happened to the plan or why it never became part of the strategy for Iraq. "I've asked and no one seems to know what happened to it," he said.
A CENTCOM spokesman said he was not familiar with the post-invasion plan and, therefore, was unable to answer questions Tuesday.
Zinni wrote about the war game in Battle Ready, a book he co-authored with novelist Tom Clancy, which was published in May. The war game was called "Desert Crossing" and was conducted at the Washington consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton. Experts from all branches of government took part in the game but, after it was done, nobody expressed interest in pursuing the results further.
"In Washington, there is no one place, agency or force that directs interagency cooperation," Zinni wrote in Battle Ready. "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 [Hussein]… there's nowhere to start."
During his speech Tuesday, Zinni called for the creation of an independent interagency organization to coordinate military and civilian planning.
"We need an interagency reorganization. The time has come," he said. "The planning in this town is not integrated. Everybody gets into a defensive crouch and protects their turf."
The new organization should not be at the Cabinet level or within an existing government body, but instead should have representatives from different departments and agencies and make recommendations to the National Security Council, he said.
"Our government needs to restructure," Zinni said. "All the agencies in this town need to have some sort of interagency planning."
He stressed that civilian and military organizations should conduct exercises with each other in order to be deployable together. If friction or turf battles arise, they should be resolved within the National Security Council, he said.
Zinni was not hopeful, however, that his recommendation would be willingly adopted by the bureaucracies in Washington. "It's going to take somebody from the legislative side," he said, "to impose this on the executive side."