SEC. 3. PROCEDURE.

SEC. 4. BASIS FOR ENACTMENT.

The comments below reflect my opinion but were written by members of moron.com... Excellent site by the way.

It seems that there are members of the House of Representatives that do not know what powers they hold and cannot hold

But, Ron Lewis - Ken(R), Jim Demint - SC(R), Terry Everett - Al(R), Richard Pombo - CA(R), Howard Coble - NC(R), Mac Collins - GA(R), Joseph Pitts - PA(R), Trent Franks - AR(R), Joel Hefley - CO(R), John Doolittle - CA(R), and Jack Kingston - GA(R) all want to do just that. These Republican members of the House of Representatives are sponsors of House Bill # 3920 to be cited as the Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004 This bill will allow the House (not the Senate and the House mind you, just the House by itself) to overturn a judgement of the Supreme Court by a 2/3rds vote for any judgement that concerns the constitutionality of an act of congress.

Do these people realize in any way, shape or form that it is the job of the Supreme Court to keep the Congress in check, to make sure that Congress does not ride roughshod over the rights of the minority through the tyranny of the majority by holding acts of Congress up to Constitutional scrutiny? How do members of congress get elected without the basic knowledge of how the three branches of government work, how checks and balances work, and how the Constitution itself works? Can or should members of congress be impeached for lack of that knowledge?

What would the outcome of this particular bill produce? The Supreme Court declares it unconstitutional, the House reverses that decision with a 2/3rds vote, the Supreme Court declares that vote unconstitutional, the House reverses that decision with a 2/3rds vote, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Why can't neo-cons come out and say what they desire - they want everyone to be, act, look, worship and think like they do, they want all power in their hands, and anyone who does not agree with them or their above mentioned "agenda" will be sent to Cuba indefinitely.

Write your Congress critters please (House and Senate, since the Senate would have to pass this bill as well). We don't need the House and the Supreme Court locked up in battle over balance of power that the US Constitution already clearly states.

Incidentally:

Article 3 section 2 does not permit Congress to overrule the decisions made by the court. You can't take that paragraph out of context like they did when writing the Act.

"Section 2. The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction;--to controversies to which the United States shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state;--between citizens of different states;--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects."

Note that this paragraph does not allow any exceptions and defines one class of cases the Supreme Court hears.

"In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make."

These two paragraphs outline which cases the Supreme Court hears and where its jurisdiction lies (first paragraph). IT DOES NOT PERMIT CONGRESS TO OVERRULE DECISIONS but it does permit Congress to make exceptions regarding the Supreme Court's jurisdiction, NOT how it may rule.

Even still, the Congress must still act within the bounds of the Constitution; it may not, for example, make a law excepting the Supreme Court from hearing any cases involving the separation of church and state. To do so would violate due process and the First Amendment.

It's worth noting that no exceptions have ever been passed by the Congress since the Constitution was written.

Our Soldiers and Us

By Eliot A. Cohen
Tuesday, May 25, 2004; Page A17

At a recent hearing a congressman began his questions to American top brass by sputtering, "I can't believe that our wonderful soldiers would do anything to hurt American foreign policy." It was a stunningly naive remark, a product of several decades of civilians' guilty consciences about their treatment of Vietnam veterans and of the gradual isolation of American elites from the reality of military service. The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not of themselves part of the price paid for the end of the draft, but perhaps the bewilderment of Americans who admire the military from afar is.

Military service, or a life spent with soldiers, brings one to the realization that soldiers, like the rest of us, fall on a continuum, a normal distribution of most human virtues and vices. At the right end of the curve lie men and women of extraordinary physical, mental and indeed spiritual distinction; people of exceptional character, whose fortitude, largeness of spirit and greatness of soul leave one humbled. The armed forces also have the others -- the liars, petty tyrants, place-hunters, opportunists, even, yes, the cowards and the brutes. By and large military service excludes or winnows out most of the latter, attracting and retaining far more of the former; it has a higher concentration of the finer types than any other walk of life that I know. But despite its best efforts, it has its share of moral weaklings and scoundrels.

Military sociology has at its core two powerful insights. First, military organizations reflect in many ways the societies from which they emerge. If a society condones brutality and lewdness, you will find soldiers beating prisoners and copulating with one another while their comrades take souvenir snapshots. If a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their corporations' moral and financial failures, do not expect generals to line up to say: "It happened on my watch, and I therefore offer the secretary of defense my resignation." In some measure, societies get the militaries they deserve.

Second, to control the use of violence amid the terrors and hardships of war, armed forces must create unusual institutions, mores and habits. When the country sends men and women to war, it asks them to endure physical and mental misery -- heat, dust and hard labor on the one hand, separation from home, boredom and fear on the other. Government equips these men and women with devastating weapons, and even when it attempts to limit their use of force, it must give them great discretion. Unless subjected to thorough training, relentless discipline and solid leadership, normal products of our society -- individualistic, hedonistic, often unreflective and rarely far-sighted -- will act badly. For that reason, Abu Ghraib reflects not merely the actions of a few sadists who somehow slipped through the net but a broader failure of military leadership.

It is up to the secretary of defense and our top generals to restore the situation, through legal processes, administrative action and their own qualities of leadership. One looks not only for courts-martial but for administrative dismissals and resignations. The vast majority of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have conducted themselves honorably and courageously, but let us not pretend that the failures here reflected only the misdeeds of an inexplicable few.

We civilians also have our lessons to learn. The first is that the costs of war extend beyond the caskets coming home to Dover and the broken bodies in Walter Reed, to the moral hazards imposed on young people dispatched to further American policy by force of arms. The second is the imperative of standing behind responsible civilian and military leaders when they insist on the highest standards of conduct for military personnel. Not long ago a Senate majority leader reproached the chief of staff of the Air Force for his service's seemingly harsh treatment of a young officer who seduced the husband of one of her subordinates. Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, however, understood what Sen. Trent Lott did not, namely, that only a fragile wall of discipline and integrity separates honorable warriors from barbarians.

The third and hardest lesson is that the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib should cause us to look harder at ourselves. The military holds up a mirror to our society; the shadows are, at times, deeper, but fortunately the lights often gleam more brightly. Nothing makes that clearer than the tale of two Army specialists. Charles A. Graner Jr.'s evil leer at Abu Ghraib belonged to an American soldier. Pat Tillman's quiet heroism on an Afghan battlefield did also. One faces trial, while the other, who forsook wealth and fame for a private soldier's anonymity, lies in a patriot's grave. We owe to the latter not only an honored memory but a sober appreciation of where each fits in the American story.

The writer is Robert E. Osgood professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

The Achilles' Heel of Fingerprints

By Jennifer L. Mnookin Saturday, May 29, 2004; Page A27


Three highly skilled FBI fingerprint experts declared this year that Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield's fingerprint matched a partial print found on a bag in Madrid that contained explosive detonators. U.S. officials called it "absolutely incontrovertible" and a "bingo match." Mayfield was promptly taken into custody as a material witness. Last week the FBI admitted that it goofed; the print actually belongs to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian.

Fingerprint evidence has long been considered an infallible form of proof, powerful enough to support a criminal conviction even without any other evidence. But when three top experts manage to blow such an important identification, our longstanding faith in fingerprints must be questioned. Nor is this the only such mistake to come to light in recent months. In January a Massachusetts conviction was overturned when the fingerprint identification, the cornerstone of the case, was shown to be erroneous.

In fact, the science of fingerprinting is surprisingly underdeveloped. We lack good evidence about how often examiners make mistakes, nor is there a consensus about how to determine what counts as a match. Our current approach to fingerprint evidence, in which experts claim 100 percent confidence in any match, is dangerously flawed and risks causing miscarriages of justice.

In Mayfield's case, the FBI located 15 points of similarity, places where the particular ridge characteristics of two prints "matched." Even the Spanish authorities, though doubtful about the match, identified eight points of similarity. While many American examiners no longer exclusively count points, experts have declared positive fingerprint matches in court after finding even fewer than eight points.

Different examiners and jurisdictions set their own standards, and the courts in the United States have left the definition of a match up to the experts themselves. Though defense attorneys have in recent years mounted challenges in court to the reliability of fingerprinting, judges have largely turned a deaf ear. What happened to Mayfield should encourage them to listen more closely.

Fingerprinting, unlike DNA evidence, currently lacks any valid statistical foundation. This is gravely troubling. Even if we assume the unproven hypothesis that each fingerprint is unique when examined at a certain level of detail, the important question is how often two people might have fingerprints sufficiently similar that a competent examiner could believe they came from the same person. This problem is accentuated when analyzing a partial print, as those recovered from crime scenes frequently are. How often might one part of someone's fingerprint strongly resemble part of someone else's print? No good data on this question exist.

The growing size of computer fingerprint databases makes this issue still more acute. As a database grows in size, the probability that a number of people will have strikingly similar prints also grows. Instead of ignoring the issue, forensic scientists need to investigate the frequencies of different ridge characteristics and develop difficult proficiency tests that examine the capability of fingerprint experts to accurately differentiate between superficially similar prints.

The FBI called the resemblance between Mayfield and Daoud's prints "remarkable." What is truly remarkable is that we simply do not know how often different people's prints may significantly resemble one another, or how good examiners are at distinguishing between such prints. DNA profiling provides what is called a "random match probability": the odds that the DNA of someone picked at random would match the profile in question. With fingerprinting, we entirely lack the information to provide an equivalent statistic. Yet without this knowledge we cannot accurately evaluate the evidentiary value of a supposed fingerprint match.

The Mayfield misidentification also reveals the danger that extraneous knowledge might influence experts' evaluations. If any of those FBI fingerprint examiners who confidently declared the match already knew that Mayfield was himself a convert to Islam who had once represented a convicted Taliban sympathizer in a child custody dispute, this knowledge may have subconsciously primed them to "see" the match. Fingerprint identification as it is now practiced is not like a double-blind scientific study. Examiners, typically law-enforcement employees, are frequently privy to outside knowledge about a case, which creates a genuine risk that their examination will inadvertently be contaminated. There is simply no excuse for failing to develop internal procedures to protect examiners from extraneous knowledge.

Until now, many people in the field of fingerprinting have defensively resisted calls for additional research and investigation of fingerprinting. Because experts are permitted to testify about "100 percent positive" matches and to claim in court an error rate for the technique of zero, they have little incentive to support any research. No matter how accurate fingerprint identification turns out to be, it cannot be as perfect as they claim.

But what befell Mayfield is embarrassing enough that it may end the defensive posturing and prompt fingerprint experts to acknowledge the acute need for better information and more caution. If this error leads fingerprint experts, judges and lawmakers to throw their support behind additional study and procedural reform, there will at least be a silver lining.
 

What bothers me about the article below is that the Army felt that it was necessary to lie and that it had the autonomy and carte blanche to get away with it. Cpl. Pat Tillman was a hero and a dedicated soldier, to lie about how he died implies that the Army had no respect for his heroism and that it is unwilling of incapable of admitting a failure. They tried to use his death to elicit justification and support for their efforts and it is at the least sleazy and at the worst disrespectful of a good soldier.

Army: Friendly Fire Likely Killed Tillman

By JAY COHEN, Associated Press Writer AP

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - Former pro football player Pat Tillman was probably killed by friendly fire as he led his team of Army Rangers up a hill during a firefight in Afghanistan (news - web sites) last month, the U.S. Army said Saturday.

Tillman walked away from a $3.6 million NFL contract to join the Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Previous military statements suggested he was killed April 22 under enemy fire.

"While there was no one specific finding of fault, the investigation results indicate that Cpl. Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire while his unit was engaged in combat with enemy forces," Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr. said in a brief statement to reporters at the Army Special Operations Command.

Kensinger said the firefight took place in "very severe and constricted terrain in impaired light" with 10 to 12 enemy combatants firing on U.S. forces.

A senior Pentagon (news - web sites) official told The Associated Press it appeared the gunfire that killed Tillman came from a U.S. soldier, but since there were Afghan soldiers present also, it was not completely clear.

An Afghan military official told the AP on Saturday that Tillman died because of a "misunderstanding" when two mixed groups of American and Afghan soldiers began firing wildly in the confusion following an explosion.

The Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also contradicted U.S. reports that the American soldiers had come under enemy fire.

Kensinger, who heads Army Special Forces, took no questions Saturday morning after reading the statement.

When Tillman was awarded the Silver Star, the Army said he was killed after his platoon was split into two sections for what officials called a ground assault convoy. Tillman was in charge of the lead group.

His group was safely out of the area when the trailing group came under mortar and small arms fire, according to the Army, and he ordered them to return.

"Through the firing, Tillman's voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground," the award announcement said. "Only after his team engaged the well-armed enemy did it appear their fires diminished.

"As a result of his leadership and his team's efforts, the platoon trail section was able to maneuver through the ambush to positions of safety without a single casualty," the announcement said.

Tillman, a member of the elite Ranger unit since 2002, was posthumously promoted from specialist to corporal and also awarded a Purple Heart.

"The result of this investigation in no way diminished the bravery and sacrifice displayed by Cpl. Tillman," said Kensinger, who heads Army Special Forces.

A woman who answered the phone late Friday at the home of Tillman's uncle said the family would have no immediate comment.

Sgt. Matt Harbusky, 25, of the Fort Bragg-based 30th Engineer Battalion, was getting ready to play a round of golf Saturday at a golf course on the base. Harbusky said how Tillman was killed does not change his bravery.

"He gave up more than anyone I know that's in the military to serve," he said. "A lot of us sacrifice something , but no one sacrificed as much as he did to join. And it doesn't really matter how he was killed, it's sad."

The friendly fire account was first reported by the Arizona Republic and The Argus of Fremont (Calif.) on Saturday.

"It does seem pretty clear that he was killed by friendly fire," Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Republic. Franks said his panel was alerted to the information by the Army's Legislative Liaison Office.

The Afghan official told the AP that two groups of soldiers had drifted some distance apart during the operation in the remote Spera district of Khost province, close to the Pakistani border.

"Suddenly the sound of a mine explosion was heard somewhere between the two groups and the Americans in one group started firing," the official said, citing an account given to him by an Afghan fighter who was part of that group, not Tillman's.

"Nobody knew what it was — a mine, a remote-controlled bomb — or what was going on, or if enemy forces were firing. The situation was very confusing," the official said.

"As the result of this firing, that American was killed and three Afghan soldiers were injured. It was a misunderstanding and afterwards they realized that it was a mine that had exploded and there were no enemy forces."

U.S. military officials in Kabul had no immediate comment.

Tillman's platoon was in the area as part of an effort called Operation Mountain Storm, in which they were charged with rooting out Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.

The Arizona Cardinals safety became the first NFL player to die in combat since the Vietnam War. He was one of about 100 U.S. soldiers to have been killed in Afghanistan since the United States invaded in 2001.

Associated Press writer Stephen Graham contributed to this report from Kabul, Afghanistan and AP Military Writer Robert Burns contributed from Washington.

 Open Season in Iraq

MAMs (Military-Age Males) Are Back

by Stan Goff http://www.counterpunch.org/

In 1963, well before the American public generally understood where Vietnam was, a young Army captain led a South Vietnamese unit through the A Shau Valley to systematically burn villages to the ground. This was to deprive the so-called Vietcong of any base of support, and was called "draining the sea," a reference to Mao's dictum that the guerrilla is the fish and the population is the sea.

That captain would later write, "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male. If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served... was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

On March 16, 1968, the US Infantry of C Company, Task Force Barker, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division went into a Vietnamese hamlet designated My Lai 4 and killed 347 unarmed men, women, and children, engaging in rape and torture along the way for four hours before a US helicopter pilot who observed the massacre ordered his door gunners to open fire on the grunts if they didn't desist. The chopper pilot, however, did not report the massacre.

Six months later, a young enlisted man, Spec 4 Tom Glen, sent a letter to General Creighton Abrams, commander of US forces in Vietnam. Without specifically mentioning My Lai, Glen said that murder had become a routine part of Americal operations. The letter was shunted over to Americal Divison, and then to the office of the same officer who had been leading the South Vietnamese arson campaign five years earlier, since promoted to major. He was now the deputy assistant Chief of Staff of the division--a functionary who was directed to craft a response to this report of widespread atrocities against Vietnamese civilians.

"In direct refutation of this portrayal," wrote the officer dismissively and with no investigation whatsoever, "is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." Perhaps he believed that those killed were MAMs, and therefore outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions and international law.

That officer is now the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who is still dutifully spinning out prevarications and excuses for his massahs. Apparently his <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932360123/counterpunchmaga> perceptions of right and wrong are still dulled by his brief experience of "combat," burning people's houses and barns and crops and ordering that young men who run from heliborne machine gun fire be killed because running away from machinegun fire is... "hostile."

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the MAMs are back.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the rat-faced boy of CENTCOM, with help from a Marine moron named Mattis, has resurrected the MAM to justify coordinated air-land attacks against weddings.

At 3 AM, on May 19th, 2004, the Rakat family of Makr al-Deeb--a village in western Iraq--were winding down after an all night party celebrating a double wedding, when American war planes suddenly screamed in from over the dark horizon and dumped a fiery axis of bombs across the village. In the wake of the bombing "prep," ground troops equipped with night vision equipment, explosives, and expensive aimpoint sights on their weapons, swept over the shattered ruins and through the terrified and fleeing wedding guests delivering a kind of close-up coup.

Neil McKay writes a harrowing account in the Sunday Herald, in which witnesses describe the ground assault as little different than the My Lai incident, just shorter and on a smaller scale. Troops were razing buildings and killing people as they were encountered. People's children were killed in front of them.

There is an unofficial excuse making the rounds that this was a mistake, that war planes targeted the wedding because this "alien culture" fires weapons into the air during celebrations. This comports well with the notion that being sodomized and sexually humiliated and beaten to death are "particularly offensive to Arabs," as if Americans, for example, would equate this treatment to root canal work--unpleasant but tolerable.

If it were an error from the air, how in the hell did a ground force follow through for the air attack? I can tell you how. There was no error. These planes were not randomly cruising the Iraqi skies at 3 AM, and suddenly responding to ground fire. And ground troops don't suddenly show up at the same place. Combined air-ground operations require detailed planning and coordination, which means this attack was planned in advance. I don't know what really happened that killed 45 people at Makr al-Deeb, but I can assure readers that this premeditation is part of it.

The official line, adopted as the Abu Ghraib scandal metastasizes into a political crisis for the Bush administration, is that there was no error at all, and that there was no wedding. They were combatants, pure and simple, and goddamit we are not going to apologize to anyone for it. Foreign fighters every one of them, and that whole fucking village is just a pack of rag-headed liars.

"How many people go into the middle of the desert to hold a wedding eighty miles from the nearest civilization," scoffed Major General James Mattis of the 1st Marines. "There were more than two dozen MILITARY-AGED MALES."

Either Mattis is shameless or he is an idiot. We can't rule out either... or both. It's in the job description for senior officers right now--probably a line on their officer evaluation reports--if they want their careers to progress.

Makr al-Deeb is a real village in a real civilization that is, oh by the way General, a hell of a lot older than the one you hail from.

Kimmitt apparently felt compelled to top Mattis for stupidity, when he blurted out last week that, "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

The manufacture of evidence is now experiencing a speed-up, with Kimmitt telling a yet-again-obedient press corps that there were military items and even possibly cocaine (!) on the site (no fetishes for devil worship... yet) , and no evidence of a wedding. To bolster this preposterous case, they have provided snapshots of (gasp) binoculars, and virtually the entire US press corps has forgotten that Colin Powell presented doctored photos to the UN just last year. The press forgot, because they never reported it. Now they are submissively echoing the Kimmitt evidence photos and the cover story that goes with them. Kimmitt says there is categorically no evidence of a wedding at all, and he stubbornly denies that ANY children were killed, even though every Iraqi medical official says there were at least 15. Liars, according to Kimmitt.

"In direct refutation of this portrayal," Kimmitt might have said, "is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Iraqi people are excellent."

Lo and behold, however, there is an independent press still surviving in the marginal niches of post-modern capitalism--where the image is all--and they are hauling facts out from time to time that smell up the area like a pile of decomposing bodies. A video has surfaced of the site, and there is ample evidence of dead children, musical instruments, and all the paraphernalia of... a wedding. Oops.

The footage was shown on Al-Arabiya television, whereupon the weasel Kimmitt and his dour gangsters demanded that Al-Arabiya give them the name of the cameraman who shot the video. Maybe they planned a Mazen Dana treatment for the offender--Dana being the Reuters journalist who was shot dead by US troops when his camera's eye had drifted to close to their actions.

We are reaching a point of polarization with respect to this war, where these oxygen thieves with suits and stars feel they can get away with the MAM argument, justifying the murder of anyone who is male, military-aged and brown. We have reached some kind of social baseline of racially-stupefied consensus, where all that PC posturing is no longer necessary, where another half-wit in Congress can say he is "outraged at the outrage," and there is 35% of the US population that will sit perfectly still for it, many even cheering it on. For that polarization to be complete, we need 35% of the population that sets aside their maddening liberal squeamishness and dithering and demands that these suits and stars be strung up by their testicles.

We need a good, in-your-face, knock-down, drag-out fight in this place.

Anyone who thinks, at this point, that the election of that hound-dog from Massachusetts--when he promises to send MORE troops to Iraq--is going to fundamentally change any of this is smoking angel dust. It's getting close to grown-up time, and we're going to have to put aside our electoral cake and ice cream.

This place hasn't had a good old fashioned DEEP-DOWN change since Reconstruction. It's time.

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti <http://www.softskull.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.100.exe/store/goff/hideous_dream.html?L+scstore+jssh4901+1060182363>"

(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932360123/counterpunchmaga>"
(Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW!
<http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. e-mail for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org <mailto:bthn@mfso.org>.

Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org <mailto:sherrynstan@igc.org>

The 10 mistakes

Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CentCom commander, lists the catastrophic blunders made by the Bush team that led to the Iraq nightmare.

Editor's note: Retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni delivered these remarks at the Center for Defense Information's board of directors dinner on May 12, 2004. From 1997 to 2000 Zinni was chief of the Central Command, which controls U.S. military operations in the Middle East, southwest-central Asia and northeast Africa.

May 26, 2004 | I just came back from giving a lecture at UCLA yesterday, and the lecture was on the Middle East. I tried to step back and take a more strategic view of the Middle East and the issues out there and maybe give them a perception of the problems and issues from the eyes of those that live with it day to day: the Arabs, Israelis, all those that make up the peoples of the Middle East.

On the way back I was thinking about what to talk about here, and I know Iraq is a hot topic, and I thought I would stay with Iraq. And I thought on the airplane about how history is going to record what happened in Iraq, how we got into it, and obviously it's too early to tell. And oftentimes the outcome defines how history characterizes it.

But I thought about how much has been misconstrued about what has happened so far, especially at a time when I commanded CentCom and we were in the process of containing Iraq as part of the policy. And I thought about the mistakes we made, that, as Bruce [Blair, the president of Center for Defense Information] said, I've commented on before.

And what I thought I would do tonight is go through the 10 crucial mistakes to this point that we've made. Because I think it helps frame what, in fact, has happened over time ... and is going to be the first part of that history. And I will conclude with maybe some thoughts on the way ahead, at least from my point of view.

I think the first mistake that was made was misjudging the success of containment. I heard the president say, not too long ago, I believe it was with the interview with Tim Russert that ... I'm not sure ... but at some point I heard him say that "containment did not work." That's not true.

I was responsible -- along with everybody from General Schwarzkopf to his two successors that were my predecessors, myself, and my successor, General Franks -- up until the war, we were responsible for containment. And I would like to explain a little bit about that containment, because I thought we did it pretty well, given the circumstances. And it began with Bush 41 [President George H.W. Bush] accepting the U.N. resolution to conduct the war, staying within the framework of the U.N. resolution, and not after the war going to Baghdad, breaking the coalition, ending up inheriting a country that I think he clearly saw would be a burden on us, our military, our treasury, and would break relations around the region, and would put him outside what he considered his international legitimacy for doing this -- the resolution by which he operated and conducted the war, and the resolution by which we established the sanctions.

Administering those sanctions was done pretty effectively I thought. In the entire U.S. Central Command, in my time there, on any given day we had less troops in the entire region than show up to work at the Pentagon any morning. Think about that. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, carriers, squadrons, battalions. On any given day ... on an average day in CentCom, we had about 23,000 troops, soup to nuts. Logistics, fighters ... and we ran that with these 23,000 troops. The whole region. To top it off, those troops were not assigned to CentCom. In other words, that structure wasn't created to be part of CentCom, like the troops are in the Pacific Command or in the European Command. These were troops that were on rotation. They came from other places, from the United States, from Europe, from the Pacific region. And they rotated through. Ships rotated through, battalions came in and out, squadrons came in and out. So we never created a structure. We did it with borrowed troops, so we could up the rheostat or lower it when we needed to.

It was, in my view, what we would call in the military an "economy of force theater" without these assigned forces. We had no American bases out there. We were sharing bases with allies in the region who provided for us. Any given year, those in the region ponied up $300 million to $500 million to support our presence out there. What we called "assistance in-kind." They provided the fuel, the food, the water, the things we needed. The Saudis built a $240 million housing complex for our troops. Never once when we decided to take action against Saddam, when he violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the inspectors operated under, never once were we denied permission to use bases, or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any particular arrangement.

During that time, when we asked allies in that region to join us in other conflicts, like Somalia, they came. Egyptians came. Pakistanis came. The Saudis came. The Kuwaitis came. The Emirates came and provided forces. They joined us in the Balkans. They joined us elsewhere on operations when we needed them. We ran the largest military exercises in the world ... in this part of the world. In Egypt we did "Bright Star." We built a magnificent coalition of forces, without ever once signing a piece of paper. And we contained Saddam. We watched his military shrink to less than half its size from the beginning of the Gulf War until the time I left command, not only shrinking in size, but dealing with obsolete equipment, ill-trained troops, dissatisfaction in the ranks, a lot of absenteeism. We didn't see the Iraqis as a formidable force. We saw them as a decaying force.

We couldn't account for all the weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors that were in there had to assume that the weapons of mass destruction that were in hMuch has been made, which confuses me, about unmanned aerial vehicles. We monitored the L-29 program ... a trainer that he was trying to put tanks on. Never once in my experience did he ever fly it unmanned. He usually crashed it even manned. And in order to even hit Kuwait, he would have to bring it into the no-fly zone and launch it from an air base where we didn't allow aircraft to fly from, and we would have taken it out -- preemptively.

We bombed him almost at will. No one in the region felt threatened by Saddam. No one in the region denied us our ability to conduct sanctions. Many countries joined us in sanctions enforcement, in the no-fly zones, and in the maritime intercept operations where we attempted to intercept his oil and gas smuggling.

So to say containment didn't work, I think is not only wrong from the experiences we had then, but the proof is in the pudding, in what kind of military our troops faced when we went in there. It disintegrated in front of us. It didn't have the capabilities that were pumped up, that were supposedly possessed by this military. And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others. It's not a pleasant thing to have to administer, it requires troops full time, there are moments when there ... there are periods of violence, but containment is a lot cheaper than the alternative, as we're finding out now. So I think that will be mistake No. 1: discounting the effectiveness of the containment.

A side note on that. The process of containment created an "alliance," which I would put in quotation marks, in the region. We located our forces in all six GCC, Gulf Cooperation Council countries. When we deployed, we made sure that we got everybody in the region pregnant when we acted, and deployed, and enforced sanctions. We deliberately put our troops in positions and operating out of bases where everybody had to make a political commitment. That was the rule and everybody understood it. And we built an arrangement out there, a security arrangement, through the enforcement of those sanctions, that I think helped us create stability. I think we made a mistake in not capitalizing on that. I think the Clinton doctrine and policy of engagement was right, but we never really got the resources or authority to do it to its fullest extent. I think there was a reluctant Congress to provide those kinds of resources, but that would have been cheaper by half. The idea to regionalize our problems and allow us to build the forces within a region that can deal with these problems, I think is a much more powerful idea. We could have done that in Africa, we could have done that in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and elsewhere.

The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of other things will work out.

The idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms. The idea that we will have people that will glom on to democracy overnight. The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape, and change the Middle East by this action -- we've changed it all right.

So we had a basic flawed strategy. All those that believed this was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change out there, or some sort of revolutionary change in the region, I think got more than they bargained for and didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation, and the issues, and the effect that what they were about to do was going to have on those.

The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam: We had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not there. I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one month before the war, and Senator [Richard] Lugar asked me: "General Zinni, do you feel the threat from Saddam Hussein is imminent?" I said: "No, not at all. It was not an imminent threat. Not even close. Not grave, gathering, imminent, serious, severe, mildly upsetting, none of those."

I predicted that the fighting would be over, the organized resistance in three weeks. To Tommy Franks' credit, he did it in 19 days. He beat my prediction. He did a magnificent job, as did our troops. But the rationale that we faced an imminent threat, or a serious threat, was ridiculous. Now, wherever history lays that, whether the intelligence was flawed or it was exaggerated, remains to be seen. I have my own opinions.

We failed, in No. 4, to internationalize the effort. To the credit of President Bush 41, he set a standard that held up throughout the post-Cold War period up until the Iraq war very well. He went to the United Nations before we undertook the operation to expel Saddam from Kuwait. Tremendous diplomatic effort to get a resolution from the United Nations to authorize the use of force and then a tremendous diplomatic effort on his part to create what I think is one of the most remarkable coalitions, the coalition we had in the Gulf War, where we had Arab countries, Islamic countries, European countries, contributions from the Far East all over the world. That model was extremely successful, and if you think about it, every intervention we had since we used the model, and it worked. We did it in Somalia, in Haiti, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, East Timor. There were variations on it, but it always started with that U.N. resolution.
Where we felt that we had to lead because we were the only ones that could do it, or it was in our vital national interests, we led. But we had magnificent coalitions. When I was in Somalia, we had to cut off the number of contributing countries in the phase that we led to 26. We had 44 commitments when we had to say, "Enough! The law of diminishing returns is setting in here in Somalia." In East Timor, the Australians took the lead, and we supported it. But again it was the international authority, the international legitimacy given to us by that U.N. resolution. And if you think about it, every time we were successful, not only did we get the U.N. resolution that we needed for the Gulf War, we got it again in '93 and in '98. When we needed to use force, we got the authorization in the wording we needed during the enforcement of the sanctions to use force.

Why would we believe that we would not get it this time? Why would we believe that this time for some reason, unlike before, the inspectors would not call the shots honestly? The inspectors don't make judgments, they just make reports of facts. We have Americans on inspection teams. Rolf Ekeus, Richard Butler, they always came across with an honest assessment of what was happening. Why, suddenly, were Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix suspect? And what was the rush to war?

I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task. And I think those of us that knew that region, former commanders in chief, I guess we can't use that term anymore -- part of transformation is to change the lexicon -- but former combatant commanders of U.S. Central Command, beginning with General Schwarzkopf, have said, You don't understand what you're getting into. You are not going to go through [former Reagan arms control director Ken] Adelman's "cakewalk"; you are not going to go through [Ahmed] Chalabi's Iraqis dancing in the streets to receive you. You are about to go into a problem that you don't know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.

I can't understand why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it's been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept, in the kind of time and effort that was given as an estimate as to what it would take.

The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci guerrillas" from London. We bought in to their intelligence reports. To the credit of the CIA, they didn't buy into it, so I guess the Defense Department created its own boutique intelligence agency to vet them. And we ended up with a group that fed us bad information, that led us to believe that we would be welcomed with flowers in the streets, that led us to believe that this would be a cakewalk.

When I testified before Congress in 1998, after a grilling from Senator [John] McCain and all those wonderful senators who supported the Iraqi Liberation Act, I told them that these guys are not credible and they are going to lead us into something they we will regret. At that time, they were pushing a plan that Central Command would supply air support and special forces, and we would put it into Iraq, and they would Pied Piper their way up to Baghdad and the whole place would fall apart. This plan was created by two Senate staffers and a retired general. I happened to be the commander of Central Command. Nobody bothered to ask me about how my troops would be used. And they were a little bit upset about me being upset about this. These exiles did not have credibility inside the country or in the region. Not only did they not have credibility, it was clear that the information they were providing us many times was not correct and accurate. We believed in them. We also brought them in with us and deemed them into the governing council, and the reception by Iraqis has been, to say the least, has not been great.

The seventh problem has been the lack of planning. I testified again during that period with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, right behind the panel of planners from the State Department and the Department of Defense, and I listened to them describe a "plan." I understood and knew that General Franks and CentCom would do their part. I knew damn right well the security piece would be taken care of, and I knew we had a good plan. I didn't hear anything that told me that they had the scope of planning for the political reconstruction, the economic reconstruction, social reconstruction, the development of building of infrastructure for that country. And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social, other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.

In my time at CentCom, we actually looked at a plan for reconstruction, and actually developed one at CentCom because I though that we, the military, would get stuck with it. In my mind, we needed formidable teams at every provincial level. Eighteen teams. The size of the CPA was about the size we felt we needed for one province, let alone the entire country, to do those other parts.

The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq. I know when that plan was presented, the secretary of defense said it was "old and stale." It sounded pretty new and fresh to me, and looking back at it now, because there were a hell of a lot more troops. It was more the [former Army Chief of Staff Eric] Shinseki model that I think might have been a hell of a lot more effective to freeze the situation. Those extra divisions we had in there were not to defeat the Republican Guard; they were in there to freeze the security situation because we knew the chaos that would result once we uprooted an authoritarian regime like Saddam's.

The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure. One hundred forty-four bodies scraped from embassies around the world, people that I know, for a fact, walked in and were selected and picked and put in the positions. Never quite fully manned-up until well into the operation. Never the kinds of qualifications or the breadth, and scope and depth it needed to work the problems down to the grassroots level. Changing horses in midstream, General Garner, I guess we can't say that he's fired. I found out tonight from Mark Thompson that the Defense Department claims he wasn't fired. But Jay Garner leaves, and in comes Jerry Bremer. Third quarter, you're down seven, bring in the backsup quarterback and part of his job is to create the game plan while he's out there
And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the 10th mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you've alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don't have blood on their hands but know how to make the trains run on time. Businessmen who I ran into in the region ... who wanted to restart their business, get jobs. They were told by the CPA, "You can't do business because you were a Baathist!" They said to me, "I had to say I was a Baathist." You don't do business in Iraq under Saddam if you're not a Baathist. Imagine throwing the Communists out of Russia at the end of the war.

Disbanding the [Iraqi] army, this is one I'll never understand, because when I arrived at CentCom as the commander, there was an ongoing program started by my predecessors to run a psychological operations campaign against the regular army. Every time we struck Iraq, we dropped leaflets on regular army formations and garrisons saying, "If you don't fight when the time comes, we'll take care of you." We sent messages to them to this effect through people in the region. When I did interviews on al-Jazeera TV and other Arab networks, I would always mention the poor Iraqi soldiers of the regular army -- victims of Saddam. We had always intended if they didn't fight, we'd get rid of the leadership, we'd keep them intact, we'd provide for some of their training, and we would have the basis for a ready-made force to pick up some of the security requirements. But they were disbanded.

And on and on and on, we've had this series of mistakes. Lack of a dialogue or identification of the leadership in the Sunni and the Shia areas. The inability to connect with the leadership down there. Somebody like Sistani, who doesn't even talk to Jerry Bremer -- I don't think they've ever had a conversation, he refuses to see him. We have now found ourselves in a position to date for these series of mistakes and many, many more, where we are. Which I think is clearly evident.

Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it's not [Time reporter] Mark Thompson, it's somebody else, and says, "What would you do now?" You know, there's a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is, we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, [Rep.] Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it's time to just pull out, cut your losses. I'm not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we've come pretty close to that.

I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that U.N. resolution. That's been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need.

We can't keep dropping paper on the U.N., it's time for a group of adults, called the Perm Five, the permanent five members of the Security Council, to sit down and come up with some agreeable, mutually developed U.N. resolution that would allow other countries now to participate. And I think there are many out there at different levels, especially in the region, that would want to participate and help, and before it comes too tough and too costly, we need to get them in. It will probably mean some of these Perm Five members and others will want to have a say in the political reconstruction and economic reconstruction, but so what?

If we create a free economy in Iraq, someday, probably sooner than later, some oil minister is going to cut a contract with the French. Guess what? That's inevitable. So why not start up front, admitting that. We need the U.N. resolution, that's the No. 1 priority.

After getting that, I would first go to the countries in the region asking their help. I would do things like ask the countries to give us five or six officers for each of our battalions and regiments and brigades and above, five or six Arab officers that have attended our schools. For each of those units that have gone to our command and general staff colleges, that not only speak English but know us, and we know them. And I'd put them on the planning staffs of these units, as advisors, as planners. If I'm a battalion commander down there in the middle of Fallujah or Najaf, I need more than some kid who happens to be of Arab descent and speaks Arabic that I dragged over there and probably doesn't speak the dialect. I would like to have five or six of these guys that I went to school with, that I know, that would be there, that would be seconded there for me as planners, advisors, and to help me in these situations.

I would ask these countries in the region to allow us to build camps along the borders of Iraq, to train police, border security, and army. I would lure the young men into these positions by considerable pay for what they are about to do, and they would deserve it. I would ask the Europeans and the others to help us build a training program, one that would last a long time, maybe even a year, to develop truly competent security forces with high morale, organizational coherence, the equipment and the pay that would make them proud. It may mean we're going to have to gut it out for a while. But it means that we have at least an end-state where we are going to put credible security forces and Iraqi forces on the ground. I would ask those countries that can commit those forces to help us, not only in patrolling cities that may be casualty traps, but in securing the borders.

There is a Ho Chi Minh trail here. Somewhere, somehow people are getting in the jihadis. I don't believe the Iraqis are blowing themselves up. They're coming from outside. We have insufficient forces to protect borders. I can't believe that we control all the major routes in and out from Kuwait and Jordan, when every day I see another IED, improvised explosive device, blow up another fuel convoy coming down that road. Forces that protect road networks -- that isn't a casualty-intensive or difficult task -- those are the kinds of forces under a U.N. agreement that I think we can get in there to perform those missions, to use the Powell doctrine and put some overwhelming force on the critical nodes, and the critical routes, and the critical infrastructure we need to protect. I would hold a conference somewhere in the region, ask the Arabs to sponsor it, although I would provide support.

I would invite every Iraqi businessman I can convince to come, and I would invite foreign investors, and I would ask them to come together, hold this conference over a period of weeks, to define what these businessmen need to establish their business, to make it grow, to re-establish it, to protect it, the kind of investment they need, the infrastructure, but the key is jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs for Iraqis. I would go to the contractors in there, and say, I don't want to see truck drivers that are coming from Peoria, Illinois. I want to pay truck drivers that are Iraqis. It doesn't take a hell of a lot of talent to drive a truck. Why aren't Iraqis driving trucks for their own reconstruction and redevelopment? Why are people from outside coming in, where they have no investment in protecting and providing for the security and the movement of those goods?

The Halliburtons and Bechtels and, and others ought to be encouraged to hire locally, unless there is a skills set that isn't present there. But I almost can't believe that you couldn't find that in there. I think we need to start talking about the kind of government we're going to eventually have in this nation. Is it a confederation? A federation? What kind of local autonomy are the Shi'a, the Kurds, the Sunnis, going to have? What will be the status of Baghdad? No one has talked about that structure publicly. We're about to turn this over to some interim council and we're heading towards, six months from now, an election, an election where the electorate is educated on how to vote Friday prayers from the pulpit.

There's no system of education for the electorate. There are no political parties that I see and have been developed openly -- there are certainly some growing that I would be suspicious of. And I think that unless we come to grips with the form of government, unless we work openly and in a transparent manner to develop political parties, and this has to be under international U.N. supervision, and unless we run a program of education for the electorate, we're not going to like the results we see by the end of January when the supposed elections are going to take place.

Those are just a few ideas. But I think it takes quality people on the ground to be able to implement these, it takes international authority and not the U.S. stamp on it, because that's not acceptable anymore. It's going to be a period of time where we're going to have to bear the burden of the most severe security responsibilities. But we ought to at least plan for a time when we can turn that over, and at least share some of the less demanding security experiences and variances. And I'm convinced that if we open this up and get the U.N. resolution, there will be those that will come in and stand by our side, boot-to-boot, on some of the tougher missions.

We also have to stop the tough-talk rhetoric. One thing you learn in this business is, don't say it unless you're going to do it. In this part of the world, strength matters. And if you say you are going to go in and wipe them out, you better do it. If you say you're going to do it and then you back off and find another solution, you have lost face. And we have got to stop the kind of bravado and talk that only leads us into trouble out there. We need to be more serious and more mature in what we project as an image. Our whole public relations effort out there has been a disaster. I read the newspapers from the region every night online, and if you watch al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, or even some of the more moderate stations out there, and you read the editorials in the newspaper, there is a different war being portrayed in that region. A different conflict than we're getting from Fox, CNN, CBS, et cetera. And we better get the two jibed somehow, because that has been a massive failure. And there again, we could use advice from the region as to how to go about it. Thank you for your attention.

Reprinted by permission of the Center for Defense Information. The Center for Defense Information is a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. Gen. Zinni is a Distinguished Military Fellow of the institute.