General thoughts on Iraq

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak -- Air Force Chief of Staff 1990-94
The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil.I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These peole have no experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.
Adm. Stansfield Turner -- NATO Allied commander for Southern Europe, 1975-77; CIA director, 1977-81
I think we are in a real mess. There are 87 attacks on Americans every day, and our people in Baghdad can't even leave the International Zone without being heavily armored . . . Whatever you call it, this is now an insurgency using the techniques of terrorism. With the borders poorly guarded, the terrorists come in. All in all, Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions.
Lt. Gen. William Odom -- Director of National Security Agency, 1985-88
It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse . . . The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take 10 - 15 years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population.
Gen. Anthony Zinni -- Commander in chief of the United States Central Command, 1997-2000
Did we have to do this? I saw the intelligence right up to the day of the war, and I did not see any imminent threat there, If anything, Saddam was falling apart. The sanctions were working. The containment was working. He had a hollow military, as we saw. If he had weapons of mass destruction, it was leftover stuff -- artillery shells and rocket rounds. He didn't have the delivery systems. We controlled the skies and seaports. We bombed him at will. All of this happened under U.N. authority. I mean, we had him by the throat.
Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy -- Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, 1997-2000
. . . I mean, Rumsfeld proudly announced that he had told General Franks to fight this war with different tactics in which they would bypass enemy strongholds and enemy resistance and keep on moving. But it was shocking to me that the seretary of defense would tell the army how to fight. He doesn't know how to fight; he has no business telling them. It's completely within civilian authority to tell you where to fight, what our major objective is, but it is absolutely no one's business but uniformed military to tell you how to do the job. To me, it was astonishing that Rumsfeld would presume to tel four-star generals, in the Army 35 years, how to do their jobs . . . As for the recent news about the 380 tons of explosives that disappeared, it's irrelevant when they disappeared. This was known by the I.A.E.A as a sight to be watched. Here is the issue: Bush tried to turn this into a political matter instead of answering questions about why he didn't follow the warnings of the IAEA. It was another example of Bush being a cheerleader instead of a leader. Nothing in Iraq was guarded except for the oil fields, which tells you why we were there . . . Still, Iraq is a bloodbath, and we need to be dealing with this in a much more sophisticated way than the cowboy named Bush.
Gen. Wesley Clark -- NATO supreme Allied commander for Europe, 1997-2000
We got into this mess because the Bush administration decided what the really wanted to do was invade Iraq, and then the only question was, for what reason? They developed two or three different reasons. It wasn't until the last minute that they came up and said, "Hey, by the way, we are going to create a wave of democracy across the Middle East." . . . But let's ask this question: Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years. I can't imagine when the last one was. And it's not just about troop strength. I mean, you will fail if you don't have enough troops, but simply adding more troops won't make you succeed.

I think somebody should have been listening to these guys.