US general damns Iraq 'nightmare'

from the BBC

Saturday, 13 October 2007, 03:33 GMT 04:33 UK

A former US military chief in Iraq has condemned the current strategy in the conflict, which he warned was "a nightmare with no end in sight".

Retired Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez also labeled US political leaders as "incompetent" and "corrupted".

He said they would have faced courts martial for dereliction of duty had they been in the military.

The best the US could manage under the current approach in Iraq was to "stave off defeat", Gen Sanchez warned.

"There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight," he said, addressing journalists at Arlington, near Washington.

'Desperate'

A catalogue of political misjudgments had paved the way for the insurgency after the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to Gen Sanchez.

He blamed the US disbanding of the Iraqi military as well as the failure to set up civilian government quickly and cement ties with tribal leaders.

The White House this year injected an extra 30,000 US troops into Iraq in the hope of stemming sectarian violence and sowing some political stability.

But Gen Sanchez branded this so-called "surge" strategy a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of shortcomings.

"The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat," he warned.

The White House responded by pointing to the report by current commander Gen David Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who said the situation was difficult but marked by gradual improvements.

White House spokesman Trey Bohn said: "We appreciate his (Gen Sanchez's) service to the country... As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have said, there is more work to be done, but progress is being made in Iraq."

Gen Sanchez was commander of coalition forces in Iraq for a year from mid-2003.

He retired last year in the aftermath of the scandal over detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. He was cleared of any wrongdoing.

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A timeline of major U.S. military and diplomatic disapproval of Bush's War

On July 28, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq, the Washington Post reported that “many senior U.S. military officers” including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed an invasion on the grounds that the policy of containment was working.

A few days later, General Joseph P. Hoar (Ret.) warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the invasion was risky and perhaps unnecessary. Morton Halperin, a foreign policy expert with the Council on Foreign Relations and Center for American Progress warned that an invasion would increase the terrorist threat.

In a 2002 book, Scott Ritter, a Nuclear Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-98, argued against an invasion and expressed doubts about the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had a WMD capability.

Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser to President George H.W. Bush was an early critic. He wrote an August 15, 2002 editorial in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Don't attack Saddam," arguing that the war would distract from the broader fight against terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which should be the U.S.'s highest priority in the Middle East. The next month, General Hugh Shelton, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed that war in Iraq would distract from the war on terrorism.

Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East and State Department's envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, echoed many of Scowcroft's concerns in on October 2002 speech at the Middle East Institute. In a follow-up interview with Salon, Zinni said he was "not convinced we need to do this now," arguing that deposing Saddam Hussein was only the sixth or seventh top priority in the Middle East, behind the Middle East peace process, reforming Iran, our commitments in Afghanistan, and several others.

By January 19, 2003, TIME Magazine reported that “as many as 1 in 3 senior officers questions the wisdom of a preemptive war with Iraq.”

On February 13, 2003 Ambassador Joseph Wilson, former charge d' affaires in Baghdad, resigned from the Foreign Service and publicly questioned the need for another War in Iraq. After the War started, he wrote an editorial in the New York Times titled What I Didn't Find in Africa that discredited a Bush Administration claim that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger.

John Brady Kiesling, another career diplomat with similar reservations, resigned in a public letter in the New York Times on February 27. He was followed on March 10 by John H. Brown, a career diplomat with 22 years of service, and on March 19 by Mary Ann Wright, a diplomat with 15 years of service in the State Department following a military career of 29 years. The war started the next day.

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.) was political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA) in the months before the war. In December 2003 she began to write an anonymous column that described the disrupting influence of the Office of Special Plans on the analysis that led to the decision to go to war.

On June 16, 2004 twenty seven former senior U.S. diplomats and military commanders called Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change issued a statement against the war.The group included:

William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan
Joseph Hoar, former Commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East
H. Allen Holmes, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations
Donald McHenry, former Ambassador to the United Nations
Merrill McPeak, former Air Force Chief of Staff
Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union
John Reinhardt, former Director of the United States Information Agency
Ronald I. Spiers, Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Political Affairs and a former Ambassador
Stansfield Turner, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council for both the latter part of the Clinton Administration and early part of the George W. Bush Administration, criticized the Iraq war along similar lines in his 2004 book Against All Enemies and during his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. In addition to diverting funds from the fight against al-Qaeda, Clarke argued that the invasion of Iraq would actually bolster the efforts of Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals, who had long predicted that the U.S. planned to invade an oil-rich Middle Eastern country.

In April 2006, six prominent retired generals publicly criticized Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war, and called for his resignation. The group included two generals who commanded troops in Iraq: Major General Charles H. Swannack Jr., (Ret.) and Major General John Batiste (Ret.). One of the generals, Lieut. General Greg Newbold (Ret.), who served as the Pentagon's top operations officer during the months leading up to the invasion, also published an article that month in Time Magazine entitled "Why Iraq Was a Mistake."

On September 12, 2007, two retired U.S. Army generals, Lt. General Robert Gard and Brig. General John Johns, joined Sen. Gary Hart in publishing a statement calling for withdrawal from Iraq.

In October of 2007, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called the 2007 "surge" a "flawed strategy", and suggested that the political leadership in the US would have been court martialed for their actions, had they been military personnel.

Posted on January 5, 2008 10:20 AM

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