Tom Clancy
Battle Ready
“We must salute Clancy for profiling Zinni… You come away thinking that you would have trusted your kid to Zinni’s command… Down at the Army’s infantry school at Fort Benning, the instructors have a saying: ‘Managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing.’ Zinni did the right thing.”
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“Fascinating… Clancy supplies lucid contexts for the general’s recollections that are the book’s meat… Zinni’s passion for ‘his’ Marines infuses
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“It is Zinni’s twenty-four-page closing statement, ‘The Calling,’ that will sell the book to nonbuff civilians, summing up his service and the ways in which he feels his generation’s legacy is in jeopardy.”
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DEDICATION
TO THE ENLISTED MEN AND WOMEN OF AMERICA’S ARMED FORCES
They are our children.
They are our nation’s greatest treasure.
They are our True Heroes.
They made four decades of service worth every second.
They granted me the greatest honor of my life — the privilege of leading them.
CHAPTER ONE
DESERT FOX
The Tomahawks were spinning up in their tubes.
It was November 12, 1998. U.S. Marine General Tony Zinni, the commander in chief of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), was standing in his command room overlooking the command center at CENTCOM’s Tampa, Florida, headquarters, leading the preparations for what promised to be the most devastating attack on Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.
The spacious command center was fitted out with desks, phones, computers, maps, and large and small screens showing updates and the positions of aircraft and ships. In addition to the usual office-type furnishings, the windowed room had secure phones and video communications with Zinni’s superiors and his commanders in the field. It was Zinni’s battle position — the bridge of his ship.
At the end of the First Gulf War, Iraq had agreed to the UN-supervised destruction of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the programs to develop and build them. That agreement had been a lie. The Saddam Hussein regime had never intended to give up its WMD program, and for the next seven years it had conducted a running battle with UNSCOM, the UN inspection operation in Iraq, to protect its programs in any way possible… by hiding them, moving them around, lying, stonewalling, delay, and noncooperation.
The two essential issues covered by the UN mandate were compliance and accountability. That is, the inspectors had to ask and get satisfactory answers to these questions: “Are the Iraqis in compliance with the UN requirement to destroy their WMD and completely dismantle their WMD programs? And are they satisfactorily accounting for the programs and WMD they claim to have destroyed?” The absence of Iraqi cooperation on both of these issues led UNSCOM to make the obvious assumption that the Iraqis were hiding something — either that the weapons still existed or that the Iraqis at least wanted to maintain their capability to make them. UNSCOM had to look hard at the worst case.[1]
When UNSCOM had persisted in carrying out the UN mandate, the Iraqis had raised the stakes — by making it ever harder for UNSCOM to do its job. There had been greater and greater threats and intimidation, lies, obstruction, and hostility… allied with a diplomatic assault aimed at splitting off powerful states friendly to Iraq (principally France, Russia, and China) from the rest of the Security Council and using their support to sabotage the disarmament effort.
With each Iraqi escalation came a counterthreat from the United States: “If UNSCOM is forced to leave Iraq with their work unfinished, the U.S. will hit Iraq and hit it hard.” The threat caught the Iraqis’ attention. As each escalation neared its climax, and the inspectors started to pull out of the country, the Saddam Hussein regime blinked, backed down, and let them return — though each time with fewer teeth.
But now it looked like the Iraqis were not going to blink. The day before, November 11, the UN inspection teams had left once again, apparently for good. As they left, President Clinton had given Zinni the signal to go. The twenty-four-hour launch clock had started.
Zinni knew the moment was approaching for the cruise missile launch — the moment of truth. These weren’t airplanes. Once the Tomahawks were in the air, they could not be recalled.
Before him was an open line to the White House, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) vice-chairman, Air Force General Joe Ralston, was sitting. Before him, too, was another line to his Navy component commander, Vice Admiral Willy Moore, in Bahrain. Moore was in constant communications with the eight ships that would launch the initial cruise missile salvo. The clock ticked on.
The twenty-four hours passed. Zinni had told the President that the strike could be stopped at any moment up to six hours before the bombs were scheduled to hit. That was the drop-dead time for a no-go decision. As it happened, he had built in fifteen minutes of fudge time as a safety margin.
But the no-go deadline had passed. And so had Zinni’s fifteen minutes of fudge time.
He took a deep breath — and then the line from the White House lit up: Saddam was backing down again. He’d agreed to UNSCOM’s demands.
General Ralston’s voice came down the wire: “It’s a no-go. Don’t shoot,” he told Zinni. “Do we have any time left? Is it okay?”
Zinni honestly didn’t know. All he could do was grab the phone and call Willy Moore…
For Zinni, this story had begun fifteen months before, on August 13, 1997, when he’d been appointed the sixth CINC (commander in chief) of CENTCOM.[2]
As commander, Zinni watched over a vast region including most of the Middle East, East Africa, and Southwest and Central Asia. His challenges were legion: the delicate, complex relationships with his regional allies; the rising threat of terrorism, led by the not yet world-famous Osama bin Laden; the growing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the chronic problems of failed or incapable states, civil wars, border disputes, and criminal activities such as drug trafficking and smuggling; and the difficult task of containing the two regional hegemons, Iran and Iraq.
Though he would have preferred a balanced approach to all the regional issues rather than having to concentrate his energies and CENTCOM’s capabilities on America’s obsession with Saddam Hussein, by far Zinni’s
