Much 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.
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