WASHINGTON, Aug 30: Several retired US generals, in a departure from tradition, have begun speaking out publicly urging caution over the idea of unilateral US military action to to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The dovish views have come from retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, the former head of the US Central Command; former general Norman Schwarzkopf, who led Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991; and Wesley Clark, former NATO commander in the campaign in Kosovo in 1999.
Even as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sound increasingly hawkish, these military leaders are urging caution.
Zinni, who is also the president’s special envoy to the Mideast, said in a recent speech to the Economic Club of Florida that Washington haD other priorities besides removing Saddam Hussein.
“We need to make sure the Taliban and al-Qaeda can’t come back,” he said, according to the Tampa Tribune, adding that a unilateral move on Iraq could end up harming US interests.
“We need to quit making enemies that we don’t need to make enemies out of,” he said.
“It’s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way,” he said, “and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way.”
Clark, writing in The Times of London this week, said said war should the the “last resort” in Iraq, and urged that any such action be taken as part of a global consensus.
“The United States cannot win single-handed, no matter how capable its military,” Clark wrote. “We should forge international consensus on Iraq ... War must remain an option. It should be the last resort.”
Schwarzkopf earlier this month told NBC that an invasion of Iraq “would not be a cakewalk” without allies and could undermine the US-led war on terrorism.
“If we invade Iraq and the regime is very close to falling, I’m very, very concerned that the Iraqis will, in fact, use weapons of mass destruction,” Schwarzkopf said.
These former top brass echoed comments from Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to Bush’s father, former president George Bush.
Scowcroft was even more blunt in an Aug 16 article in the Wall Street Journal.
“Don’t attack Saddam,” he wrote. “An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken.”
Despite Saddam’s sabre-rattling, “there is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of his aggression,” Scowcroft said.
Michael Vickers, a former US special forces captain and now a defense analyst, said there may not be as much of a rift as it appears and that the military will nonetheless fall into line.
“Zinni has long been opposed to an invasion in Iraq,” Vickers said. “He’s advocating containment of Saddam Hussein, not his overthrow ... it’s a little unusual since he has an active if informal role in the administration (but) it does not necessarily reflect broad views among retired four-star generals.”
According to Vickers, among the active duty generals, “the debate is more on how to do it, when to do it.”
IRAQ DELIGHTED: Baghdad crowed with delight at the mounting European nervousness over threatened US military action.
“US decision-makers can no longer count on Europe in the 21st century. Having realised it was tricked by America in attacks in different parts of the world, (Europe) is starting to distance itself from US visions and goals,” said Ath-Thawra, mouthpiece of the ruling Baath party in Baghdad.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan also warned Washington it will not be as easy to replace Saddam as it was to get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and dismissed as irrelevant Iraqi opposition groups.
“Iraq is not Afghanistan, and I believe the American administration itself knows that,” Ramadan told reporters in Beirut.
He rejected Bush’s charges that Baghdad has been developing chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons.
Washington will convene a meeting next week in London of Iraqi opposition scholars and intellectuals as part of a series of seminars it is holding to map out a post-Saddam future for Iraq.
Amid the growing tension, US and British warplanes staged a new raid Friday on military installations in southern Iraq.
“In response to recent Iraqi hostile acts against coalition aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone, coalition aircraft used precision-guided weapons today to strike a surface-to-air missile site near An Kut, 240kms southeast of Baghdad”.—AFP