Zinni's Folly

Like so many other lib media darlings, former Clinton CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni has a history that proves inconvenient.

Zinni is being promoted as a principled man, daring to speak out against the evil Donald Rumsfeld, claiming "that he never saw any proof that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction."

But Zinni's own words have come back to haunt him. He has managed to discredit himself royally, and the lib media have pretended not to notice.

From Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters:

[A]another bizarre oddity concerning the media's acceptance of Zinni's current position is the revelation that in the year 2000, Zinni actually briefed senior Clinton administration officials concerning a massive military strategy to overthrow Saddam. As reported by the Chicago Tribune on October 2, 2000: "Zinni has briefed senior administration officials on a secret war plan that details how the U.S. military, with limited allied help, would seek to topple Hussein. The effort would be massive, involving possibly as many as half a million troops, according to one knowledgeable official."

The article continued: "Although he has confidence in U.S. forces, Zinni has no illusions that such a scheme could win public support, considering the cost in lives and dollars it would almost certainly involve." Yet, Zinni expressed his discontent with the U.S. policy of containment at the time: "'Containment is what you do when you can't come up with the popular will to take decisive military action.'"

Now, if Zinni believed that Saddam either didn’t possess WMD at that time, or wasn’t an imminent threat to American security and sovereignty, why would he be offering a plan that would involve up to 500,000 American soldiers to overthrow the dictator? Moreover, if all this plan needed to succeed was "the popular will to take decisive military action," why would Zinni be opposed to a war that was initially waged with huge public support that was lacking when he offered his own overthrow plan three years earlier?

Sheppard asks, "[W]hy hasn’t one major media outlet uncovered this October 2, 2000 story, revealed its existence to the public, and asked Gen. Zinni why he felt so strongly about overthrowing Saddam in 2000, but thinks it was a mistake to do it in 2003?"

It's a legitimate question, and it perfectly illustrates the media's slant.

Another point that the lib media fail to raise is that there are some 8,000 active duty and retired generals. A total of seven have come out against Rumsfeld.

Not exactly a groundswell of opposition, is it?

Nonetheless, the media keep pushing the significance of the retired generals' mutiny.
Bud Hiller's take on Zinni's embarrassing lack of credibility is worth reading, if you want a sip of truth with that gulp of propaganda being served up by the lib media.

Hiller writes:

Zinni, who now complains that President Bush cherry-picked pre-war Iraq weapons intelligence and misled the country into going to war, warned six years ago that Saddam Hussein's WMD program was the biggest threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

"Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region," Zinni told Congress on March 15, 2000.

"Despite claims that WMD efforts have ceased," the general-turned-war-critic said, "Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions, and is concealing extended-range Scud missiles, possibly equipped with CBW \[chem-bio-weapons\] payloads."

Then, Hiller offers a taste of the side of Zinni that the lib media have been drooling over.

"What bothered me," Zinni told TV host Tim Russert, was that "I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD.

"Now, I'd be the first to say we had to assume he had WMD left over that wasn't accounted for: artillery rounds, chemical rounds, a Scud missile or two. But these things, over time, degrade. These things did not present operational or strategic level threats at best."

In 2000, Zinni said, "Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains the scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months."

Since Russert has been on an anti-Rumsfeld crusade for years, I guess that's why he didn't dig up Zinni's past statements to challenge him on that dramatic about face.

It's this sort of stuff that reinforces the notion of how thoroughly invested the mainstream media are in assaulting President Bush and the Administration.

I think the "Rage against Rummy" army is due to retreat.