Battle Ready

CENTCOM

In August 1996, the new commandant of the Marine Corps, General Chuck Krulak, nominated Tony Zinni as deputy commander in chief (DCINC) of U.S. Central Command,[70] located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

Leaving command of I MEF was hard, yet Zinni welcomed the opportunity to continue to serve. At the higher levels of the military hierarchy, it’s either move to a new position or retire. CENTCOM was in fact a particularly welcome assignment… “It’s where the action is,” he thought. “It’s operationally oriented; and I’m already familiar with the command from my Somalia experiences and I MEF,” which was assigned to CENTCOM as a responding unit when required. He quickly supplemented his initial store of knowledge by plowing through more than fifty books on the history and culture of the region.

When Zinni arrived at CENTCOM headquarters early in September, he did not find a happy place. The command had just suffered the worst terrorist attack on U.S. facilities since the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. A suicide truck bomb had killed nearly twenty Americans at Khobar Towers, an Air Force barracks in eastern Saudi Arabia (CENTCOM had also suffered a bombing of one of its security assistance facilities in Riyadh). The tragedy weighed heavily on the command, cast a dark cloud over the remainder of General Binnie Peay’s tour as commander in chief of CENTCOM… and directly affected Zinni as DCINC when General Peay tasked him to oversee the implementation of the hundred-plus recommendations put forward by a fact-finding commission chaired by retired Army General Wayne Downing. It was clear that the terrorist threat was growing ever more dangerous and that force protection was becoming a dominant theme for America’s military leaders.

The Downing Commission recommendations ranged from the relocation of units to the establishment of more stringent security; and there was a lot of pressure to get them implemented. Some of the recommendations were straightforward, such as adding security forces, putting up barriers, and other forms of physical security. Some took more time. For example, the commission recommended reducing the number of “accompanied tours” in the region, which are tours of duty for which military personnel can bring their families. This recommendation was not well received, especially for those in assignments such as security assistance billets, which require people to stay in one place for at least two or three years to be effective. Nevertheless, a blanket decision was made to drastically reduce the number of accompanied tours. Most people would now be rotating out after a year… which was about the time it took to get up to speed. (This policy was eventually partially reversed.)

Downing had also recommended moving CENTCOM headquarters out to the region. But when the command looked hard at setting up a major headquarters in that part of the world — at all that it would take to make the move; to set up the security; to take care of the military construction, the politics, the families and schools — the expenses were so great that the issue was deferred.

Instead, CENTCOM settled on setting up a rapidly deployable forward headquarters, with forward elements of the headquarters of its subordinate commands — ground, air, naval, and special operations — in place. (For the invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Tommy Franks set up his forward headquarters in Qatar, which was one of the locations that had previously been designated for a CENTCOM forward headquarters.)

Good or bad, the Downing Commission recommendations could be dealt with in a straightforward, professional way. But the commission report went further than that; it assigned blame, which took the fact-finding process into more questionable territory. There is a fine line between assessing responsibility, assessing blame, and scapegoating. When the report was issued, blame for the “failures” that had allowed the attack to succeed was dumped primarily on CENTCOM and the commander at Khobar Towers.

This was not a completely irrational judgment: The commander has to carry ultimate responsibility for what goes on in his command. The buck has to stop somewhere.

On the other hand, the military exists to handle situations that are by definition high-risk. You want to reduce those risks as much as possible, but there is a point at which reducing risks also greatly reduces the effectiveness of the military. Total safety and total security are not conditions of the military life.

You can reduce risk to the point of absurdity: “Don’t cross streets. You’ve got lousy drivers out there.” And you can build — and cower in — impregnable bunkers.

Tony Zinni:

During the Downing Commission’s investigations, the commission’s approach to the command was open and nonjudgmental. But the Downing report was another thing. The tone of the report was much more fault and blame assigning than was warranted. And worse, many of the security steps that we were forced to implement impacted negatively on our mission.

What bothered me about the report (but the problem goes far beyond that, as I have made clear in later testimony to Congress) is its failure to understand that we live in a risky world. We have been stalked by terrorists. And they’re still after us. Yet in order to do our mission, we have to take risks. The only one hundred percent safe way to avoid them is not to go there. But if we’re going to be in the region, and we’re going to do our job, there is risk involved. We’re going to expose troops.

The mood back in the United States has been deeply frustrating, and that is: We have to make our force presence in the world one hundred percent safe for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. And if one soldier, sailor, air-man, or Marine is injured or lost to a terrorist activity, then we have to find somebody on our side to blame for it.

I can’t think of a more dysfunctional way to run military operations.

The job of implementing Downing Commission findings consumed much of Zinni’s time during the next year — and after.

In the meantime, CENTCOM was a beehive of activity.

Containing Iraq was always a primary order of business; several flare-ups with Saddam after the Gulf War had required military responses. Usually these occurred while enforcing the no-fly and no-drive zones in Iraq. Iraqi tankers, however, were also smuggling sanction-busting oil down the gulf. U.S. Maritime Intercept Operations had grabbed a number of smugglers; but most had proved very hard to stop; they avoided American naval patrols by using Iranian territorial waters (and paying tolls to the Iranians).

The command had continued the longtime U.S. containment policy toward Iran (the other regional hegemon); and tensions there remained high. U.S. naval forces in the Gulf daily confronted hostile and aggressive Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard naval forces; their harassments and provocations could easily have sparked major confrontations.

The Gulf was not the only hot spot. There were others in East Africa and Southwest Asia. And the forever-crisis between Israelis and Palestinians impacted every country in the region, though it was not itself in CENTCOM’s AOR. The command constantly had to reevaluate and adapt itself to ever-changing realities and challenges.

After the Gulf War, Marine General Joe Hoar, the CENTCOM CINC who followed General Norman Schwarzkopf, launched a major effort to create strong relationships between the U.S. and friendly nations in the region; and built a solid foundation for military cooperation.

General Peay added to this foundation by enhancing America’s force presence in the region. This had to be done carefully; basing U.S. military forces there jarred local sensitivities. He skirted that problem by structuring a force that combined prepositioned equipment and rotational units,[71] spreading the forces throughout the Gulf area, using joint facilities to conduct operations,[72] and placing a select few headquarters of subordinate commands in the region to run day-to-day operations. These actions demonstrated America’s intent to share the military burden and gain local cooperation and support for its military missions… while not building U.S. bases in the region or basing dedicated forces there. As an added benefit, they allowed flexibility in the size and composition of U.S. forces.

These new directions created far greater capabilities for meeting the emerging challenges in this vital area of the world. Tony Zinni was the beneficiary of the innovative and tireless work of Generals Hoar and Peay.

From his first day on the job, Zinni got himself up to speed militarily by immersing himself in briefings, intelligence reports, and conversations with commanders who had experience in the region. But he knew this was not enough. There was nothing like being there. He already knew how important it was to see a place firsthand, and to spend enough time there to build critical relationships.

General Peay made frequent trips to the region. While he was away, Zinni stayed behind, keeping the home fires burning, as the nature of his job dictated (the CINC goes forward and the DCINC stays back). Yet each time Peay returned, his increased insight and wisdom amazed Zinni. You can’t acquire such things from briefings and readings at headquarters.

Several months after his arrival at CENTCOM, Zinni at last made a trip to the region. His primary orientation was to check out the forces — what were out there, what they were doing, seeing them on the ground, getting briefs. But he also visited senior military commanders and national leaders.

During his visit, he attended a number of social events with Arabs… he would attend many others over the next years. People in that part of the world don’t sharply distinguish business from social.

Zinni:

In the Arab world, they conduct business far more casually than we do at home — or in Europe, the Pacific, and other places where I’d served. In America or Europe, the meetings are structured. There’s a timetable and an agenda. You limit small talk — and feel guilty when you indulge in it. You tick off items that must be covered. And once they’re covered, you instantly move on.

That’s not the way Arabs like to do business. They don’t jump directly into the “big issues”; they prefer a far more casual mix… and not because they don’t understand the issues. Rather, it’s the way they connect and take the cut of a man. Personal relations and trust built out of friendship are more important than just signing paper agreements. They’ll sit around a room and drink coffee, eat some nice food, laugh a little, and have an easygoing conversation about their families, hunting, the weather, or anything else that doesn’t seem terribly important. In time, they’ll subtly work their way toward the business at hand and deal with it. But don’t try to rush them.

When Westerners have tried that — even CINCs — it’s led to problems.

Our way of conducting business just doesn’t work there. When we try it, we’re not well received. Yet politeness, graciousness, and hospitality are so inbred in Arabs that we may not recognize that they’ve turned off to us. They will always be polite to guests. Hospitality is more than just a nice civility in that part of the world; it’s a duty and obligation. To be inhospitable or impolite is a sin. On the other hand, they really take to people who like their kind of personal interaction. But doing that right is truly an art.

An art I’ve always enjoyed practicing.

It’s interesting to watch Washington insiders out there dealing with Arabs. In Washington, everyone is comfortable with formality. That’s how they do business. It goes with the pin-striped suits.

During one of our crises with Saddam Hussein, Secretary Cohen and I went to several countries in the region to obtain permission to bomb Iraq. Okay, our way of doing things: You hand them the paper and they read the fine print and sign on the dotted line. No problem… Only, that’s not how Arabs operate. They don’t directly tell you yes or no. They have ways of signaling their intention, but the signals aren’t clear unless you understand them.

In one country, Secretary Cohen pressed and pressed and he got nowhere; they didn’t want to give an answer. But as we were leaving, they said, “You must always know we are your friends.”

After we walked out, Cohen said, “Did we get an answer?”

“Yes, we did,” I said. “We can do it.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Yes, in the end when they told you they’d always be our friends, that was their answer. That meant they were telling you to go ahead and do it. Don’t make an issue of it.”

In another country, we were told, “Please, don’t ask us to do this.”

This really meant: “Do what you’ve gotta do. No one’s going to interfere. But don’t ask us the question that we don’t want to answer, either way.”

Americans are of course always looking for the hard-and-fast no-yes.

In many other cultures, such as the Israelis’, people are frank, blunt, and to the point; and they see anything less than that as a sign of less than full friendship. With good friends, you should be that honest and open. You’re only polite to people you’re not close to or don’t like.

Each culture ticks differently. It isn’t that the basic values are different, it’s that there are cultural subtleties and cultural sensitivities that you really need to understand.

Early in 1997, General Peay was approaching the end of his tour as CINC. Though it was customary to alternate the job between Army and Marines, Zinni did not expect to be offered the job. No one ever before had risen from the DCINC position at CENTCOM to become commander. So Zinni was knocked off his feet when General Krulak told him he was nominating him as General Peay’s successor… It was a surprise; yet there was no job in the world Zinni would rather have had. It was the part of the world where his fighting experience, cultural experience, personal connections, and knowledge could be best used by his country.

But first a big obstacle had to be passed.

Zinni was informed that General Shalikashvilli, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed his nomination, supporting instead his good friend Butch Neal (whose credentials for the job were superb), on the grounds that Zinni was far too “outspoken” and could not be “controlled.” Zinni had a hard time understanding the chairman’s objections (they had worked well together during Operation Provide Comfort), but he took a stoic approach to the situation: If the chairman didn’t support his nomination, it wouldn’t go through. Live with it.

That meant his career was effectively over. He told his wife to make quick retirement plans; he took the transition course for retiring military personnel; they bought property in Virginia, and talked to architects and contractors about building their retirement home.

General Krulak and the Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton, submitted both names, Zinni’s and Neal’s. Zinni was grateful, but convinced it wouldn’t matter. He went through what seemed to be a pro forma interview with the Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen, and waited for the inevitable moment when he would call Butch Neal with his congratulations.

A few weeks later, Zinni got hit with another stunner: Secretary Cohen called to tell him he was the administration’s pick for CINC of CENTCOM; his nomination had been forwarded to the Senate for approval.

Tony Zinni:

After getting over the shock, I set about gathering advice about the emerging challenges of the command and its future direction in the dynamic environment we faced in our AOR. In time I expected these ideas would contribute to a new CENTCOM strategy for our region; I had thoughts on that score that I wanted to develop.

Of all the advice I received, three people — Joe Hoar, Binnie Peay, and Ed Fugit — gave me the wisest counsel.

General Hoar emphasized relationships. “In that part of the world, personal relationships are often more important than formal agreements,” he told me. “Remember our days as advisers in Vietnam. There we knew the value of building trust and friendship.”

The outgoing CINC’s political adviser (POLAD) reinforced General Hoar. Ed Fugit, an experienced diplomat and deeply familiar with our region, advised me to connect personally with both the leaders and the people. “But you can take that even farther,” he continued, “by showing interest in their culture and society. Do that and you build trust and confidence.”

I warmed to this approach. Too often we get caught up in crises, rushing around with requests, programs, and policy positions, without taking the time to listen to the concerns of the people who have to live with our decisions.

“And choose your POLAD well,” he concluded. “It’s the most important personnel decision you’ll make.” He was right; and I had the good fortune to select as my POLAD Larry Pope, a former ambassador, Arabic speaker, and brilliant diplomat… and my right hand for the next three years.

General Peay’s advice came on the final day of his command. “Be your own man,” he told me, “and don’t feel obliged to follow my strategy. The AOR is dynamic. You’ll have to reevaluate and update the command’s strategy and policies. You must take a fresh look, as all new CINCs should, and put your own personal touch on our tasks.”

I was grateful for his encouragement… and his blessing. Binnie Peay had become a friend and mentor. He had sought my input on every issue, trusted me to make critical decisions, and left me with a command in excellent condition to meet the many crises and threats we later had to face. His focus on building our war-fighting capabilities is still paying off.

On August 13, 1997, I became the sixth commander in chief of the United States Central Command.

STRATEGY, POLITICS, AND THE NEW AMERICAN EMPIRE

Tom Clancy: Tony Zinni will take the rest of the chapter.

My immediate priority as CINC was to reshape our strategy in the light of our ever-changing AOR and the emerging global strategy of the Clinton administration. We needed a structure, a horizon, and goals to meet the many challenges in this most risky part of the world. Without these, our day-to-day work would have no focus.

CENTCOM had twenty countries in its AOR (soon to be twenty-five) — a diverse region that spanned an area from East Africa through the Middle East to Southwest and Central Asia and into the Indian Ocean. Yet the command’s near-total focus was on the Persian Gulf and our long-standing problems with Iran and Iraq — our major threats in the region. We were operating under a national security strategy called “Dual Containment,” whose objective was to protect Gulf energy resources, contain both Iraq and Iran, and maintain local stability. We were the only unified command with two major “theater of war” requirements (as we say in the military): fight Iraq, or fight Iran.

These threats were not about to go away. Yet other parts of the AOR were heating up, requiring us to broaden our focus beyond the Gulf States.

Weapons of mass destruction were proliferating all through the region. The Iraqis had used them in the ’80s. The Iranians were acquiring them. Pakistan and India were in serious conflict over Kashmir and tossing ever louder threats at each other (Pakistan was in CENTCOM’s AOR; India was in PACOM’s); our relationship with Pakistan had soured for all sorts of political reasons; and both countries were nuclear powers.

Afghanistan was a catastrophe.

East Africa — Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia — were trouble spots.

Terrorist activity was picking up.

We’d had little recent contact with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia. Developing relationships with Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and the Seychelles required new engagement programs. Long-standing relationships with Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman had to be maintained and strengthened. We had to rebuild our shaky relations with Pakistan. And a little later, most of the Muslim states of Central Asia that had split off from the Soviet Union — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan — were added to CENTCOM’s AOR. Each had its own special problems (including a civil war in Tajikistan).

CENTCOM found itself in a bubbling pot of crises from one end to the other. We had to develop a CENTCOM strategy to handle them… without necessarily using military force — or else only as a last resort. We needed to help build stability in this troubled region, in my view, or we would pay the price in the long run.

A regional conference was scheduled at CENTCOM headquarters for early 1998, and I wanted to firm up the strategy by then.

We were not approaching this process with a blank slate. Since ours was probably the most volatile region in the world, we were starting with thirteen preexisting war plans, an exceptionally large number for a unified command. These come out of taskings from the Secretary of Defense to prepare to counter either a specific threat or sometimes more generic situations, like what we call “consequence management.” Let’s say somebody explodes a nuclear device or uses other WMD. We had operational plans to police up these situations. Other plans dealt with Iraq or Iran. Others were aimed at generic missions such as “keeping the Gulf open for the free flow of oil.” And so on. Each plan had a real possibility of execution, given the nature of the region.

These plans gave us a war-fighting orientation that we were well postured to deal with, thanks to the work of General Peay. We now needed to expand and broaden the strategy beyond that dimension.

In order to get a better fix on all the issues, I talked first to my commanders, then sought input from friendly leaders of the nations in our AOR and from U.S. diplomats with expertise in the area, to ensure that we were all working in sync.

For the bigger picture, we turned to President Clinton’s emerging National Security Strategy, with its stress on engagement and multilateral-ism. The military implementation of this strategy is the job of the Secretary of Defense, whose National Military Strategy looks at the National Security Strategy from a specifically military point of view. Every four years, the Secretary of Defense presents to Congress and the President what is called “the Quadrennial Defense Review,” which offers still more specifics about how the military side of defense is going to execute the National Security Strategy. It directs the Unified Commands to build new strategies for our assigned regions based on these concepts. The QDR directed the CINCs to “shape, respond, and prepare.” This reflected not only the war-fighting responsibilities (respond, prepare), but the new charge to “shape” our areas of responsibility.

The Secretary of Defense also directed the CINCs to prepare Theater Engagement Plans for our AORs. This is our strategy for engaging with the countries with whom we have relations on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, it is our plan for helping friendly countries build their militaries, for cultivating and building coalitions for security cooperation, and for welding together viable multilateral teams to deal collectively with the chronic problems we face and to better stabilize the region. In other words, it is the “friendly” side of our overall strategy.

The first problem CENTCOM had to fix was the near-total focus on the Persian Gulf. To that end, I decided to “subregionalize” our strategy, by breaking the AOR into four subregions — East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central and Southwest Asia, and Egypt and Jordan — and developing a strategy and programs for each. This approach would ensure that our Gulf-centric tendency did not detract from the programs and relationships we developed in other areas. Though I knew this would not be a clean separation — many interests overlapped — I felt we could accommodate that.

Because the nations of each subregion had their own problems, we also had an articulated strategy for each country. In addition, I assigned each of our military components “focus” countries that fit their capabilities and their compatibility with the militaries of these nations. This spread the burden and balanced the span of control in managing our various engagement programs and crisis response requirements.

I then broke down our strategic goals into three areas: war fighting, engagement, and development.

The war-fighting goals were designed to have in place the right plans, forces, and basing options for any possible crisis. We also built a basis for responding to crises cooperatively with regional allies through training, exercises, military assistance, intelligence sharing, military schooling, and the like.

Three more practical war-fighting issues also had to be dealt with.

The first was agreement on a Joint Fires standing operating procedure (SOP) to coordinate fires on the battlefield. Up to this point, the services had been unable to agree on a joint doctrine for battlefield coordination, direction, and procedures for our air and ground-based fires systems. This may have seemed to be a mere intellectual issue back in the States, but for us it was life or death. In our AOR, war was always a near possibility. If war broke out, without coordination of fires we could expect serious friendly fire casualties or even battlefield failures. We couldn’t wait for the services to work through their bickering and rivalries. I therefore directed my component commanders to work together to produce the CENTCOM Joint Fires SOP (if they hit issues they couldn’t resolve, I told them I would make the call). These superb professionals delivered, providing an SOP that their services and service chiefs accepted (although only for the CENTCOM AOR).

My second objective was to finish work already started under General Peay to set up a command element, or small forward headquarters, in the AOR for each of my components, providing them command facilities they could rapidly fall into if the balloon went up. When I became CINC, the Navy already had its full headquarters in the region, and the Air Force had its air operations center there. But I also wanted the Army and Marine Corps to establish a forward element for the Joint Force Land Component Command (JFLCC), which would run the coordinated ground battle in Kuwait. As a result, we established Joint Task Force (JTF) Kuwait; and I had the CENTCOM Special Operations Command establish a forward command element in Qatar. This gave me a base to build on for all the functional component headquarters (air, ground, naval, and special operations) if we had to quickly respond to a crisis. Though this was controversial and caused grumblings among rear echelon doctrinal purists, who didn’t understand the purpose of these JTFs forward, we ignored their criticisms.

My third objective — never fully accomplished during my tenure — was to create one logistics command for the theater, to control and coordinate the massive logistics effort we would have to undertake in a major crisis. The system of separate and competing service and coalition systems, all putting stress on the limited lines of communications and infrastructure in the region, would really cause us problems if we didn’t have one umbrella organization to pull all the support needs together and ensure security for our rear area networks.

Though the components developed a basic design before I left command, and the U.S. Army was chosen to be the core of this joint/combined Theater Support Command for CENTCOM, the plan drew criticism and resistance again from doctrinal traditionalists, who didn’t understand the realities of the battlefield; and I was unable to accomplish this innovation before I left.

Our engagement goals were designed to build strong security relationships and allied capabilities, and to enhance the education of military leaders and familiarize them with principles and values that drove our military system. Though much of this area was related to war fighting, it went beyond that to work in cooperative areas that were not strictly military, such as environmental security issues and natural disaster responses. This built the day-to-day military relationships and capabilities needed to respond to crises and work as a combined team.

Our development goals were objectives for establishing new relationships, improving regional stability, and countering emerging threats. They were also related to the development of CENTCOM itself as it evolved to meet future challenges and a changing defense environment. These were the primary “shaping” efforts directed by the QDR.

In designing this ambitious strategy, we cooperated closely with the Joint Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and our State Department partners at embassies in the AOR and at the regional bureaus in State’s Washington headquarters. Our strategy also reflected ideas contained in the Clinton administration’s new global strategy… and from my own lifetime experience in the military, in conflict resolution, and in peacemaking.

The Clinton strategy represented a significant shift in the way the United States related to the rest of the world. Though the administration did not always handle this shift as effectively as they could have, their overall approach was, in my view, correct. Unfortunately, the Clinton strategy lacked the resources to be fully and effectively implemented.

In America, we look at the world from two powerfully opposed angles of vision. We are either “engaged” or “isolationist.”

The engaged — people like Wilson, Marshall, and Truman — believe we can prevent conflicts by actively shaping the environment that produces them, by directly involving our military, diplomatic, and economic capabilities in the world to make conditions better, to stabilize the various regions, to build partnerships, and to do it collectively — by using the UN and regional (or larger) multilateral coalitions and institutions. In the long run, they see engagement as less costly than any of the alternatives.

The isolationists fight this view. They see the world as so big, so messy, so out of control, that nobody can fix it. And even if we could help a little here or there, dozens of other hopeless cases lie festering. And besides, who says we have any responsibility for the rest of the world anyway? Who made us the policemen of the world? We should be bringing troops home, not committing them to useless foreign “engagements.” Who said we have to suffer all the risks and shoulder all the costs of making the world better? Foreign aid is just another way to throw good money down a bottomless hole. We could use it better at home tending — and protecting — our own garden. Yes, we have friends whom we will continue to support. We have interests that we will protect. But that’s all the involvement in the world that we want or need. During the Clinton years, Congress generally tended to back the isolationist side and was not supportive of providing resources for engagement.

“Engagement” was not an airy concept (though many portrayed it that way). It came with nitty-gritty specifics (though these varied, depending on whether the country in question was an adversary, a friend, or potentially a friend). We had very formal ways to “engage” both militarily and diplomatically (the two had to work in tandem). And we expected these to lead to clear and specific results.

For example, in a form of military engagement we call “Security Assistance,”[73] specific components — foreign military sales, foreign military financing, provision of excess defense articles, training, education in our school system, intelligence sharing, and so on — were expected to create a formal and developing military-to-military relationship.

Thus when we embarked on a new relationship of engagement (as we did in my time with the Central Asian states or Yemen), we’d usually begin programs informally, in a small way, and later we’d make them more formal… put them into one or more of the categories, set up a program to develop their actual resources, set up and fund joint training programs, and the like. In other words, engagement might start informally, but it was expected to grow into a more formal relationship. I felt that if we were more aggressive and planned and coordinated engagement programs better — military, diplomatic, economic, cultural, etc. — we could truly “shape” a more stable, secure, and productive environment in troubled regions of the world.

The Clinton administration’s engagement policies had the added effect of building on a process that the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the end of the Cold War had already started — the expansion of the role of the CINCs in their regions. Goldwater-Nichols, passed in the mid-’80s, gave more power to the CINCs, but primarily as war fighters. By the end of the ’90s, Goldwater-Nichols had come into bloom; the CINCs had become far more than war fighters; and the Clinton administration gave the CINCs all around the world a mission to shape their regions and use multilateral approaches in ways that went beyond the CINCs’ traditional military role.

This was not simply a wish. The administration strongly promoted and stressed this change; and they made it very clear that they wanted the CINCs to implement it.

But not everyone welcomed it, including the CINCs themselves. The change came because there was no other choice. No one else could do the job.

When I took over as commander of CENTCOM, I found a tremendous void in the diplomatic connections in our AOR. There was a void in expanding the personal relationships that Generals Hoar and Peay had worked hard to create. There was a void in establishing and implementing policy.

The void came from several causes.

One, the State Department had not been given the resources they needed to do their job. The neo-isolationists had cut foreign aid, leaving the State Department without the wherewithal — the people, the money, the programs — to make the impact they should have been making.

Two, while the end of the Cold War had greatly diminished any chances of a world-spanning conflict, crises had begun to pop up all over the place; and the military found itself involved in confronting all of them, even those that were not totally military problems.

Three, the CINCs now had resources the State Department did not have; the power of the CINCs was now growing (a reality recognized throughout our region); and the CINCs soon became the chief conduit to personal connections and to the resources State did not have. Much of what got done was done through the CINCs.

During my time as a CINC, I was asked to carry out presidential and other diplomatic missions that would normally have fallen to diplomats. I’m sure such things frustrated the State Department, but I don’t think they disapproved. In fact, they were very supportive. It was more a case of: “Well, if we can’t do it, at least somebody is taking care of it. If it’s the CINCs, then God bless them.”

Like most CINCs, I tried to work very closely with the State Department. In every country, our ambassador is the President’s representative. I never did anything that an ambassador did not know of and approve.

Moreover, the CINCs often had more personal presence and far more connections than the ambassadors. In many countries in CENTCOM’s region, for example, the senior government leadership is also the senior military leadership. This is not our system (and the downsides are obvious), yet the fact had practical consequences. They were usually more comfortable with soldiers than with diplomats in many cases.

In fact, more often than not, the ambassadors were very glad we were there. We not only brought them the connections we’d made, but we provided them with the ability to get things done they couldn’t ordinarily do… some small, some larger.

Anything we did for the ambassadors had to have some military overlap. We couldn’t simply blatantly set up an aid program. But even here we had some room to maneuver. In Africa, for example, we might be engaged in teaching a country’s military how to conduct peacekeeping or humanitarian operations, and we might set up training exercises in the villages. I would send out my military veterinarians, dentists, and doctors (who needed the training; they needed to practice these kinds of operations) to go into the villages with the African country’s military, and they’d conduct the exercises together. In the context of the military exercise, we’d build an orphanage or paint a school or set up a clinic as a Civic Action project. We’d be providing our guys with useful training while showing the African troops actually how to do it; and at the same time, we were benefiting needy people. When the exercises were over, we would have the American ambassador cut the ribbon for the new clinic. It was important, in my mind, to always demonstrate civilian leadership of our military and the close cooperation between our diplomats and soldiers.

The countries of Central Asia are prone to frequent and often devastating natural disasters such as earthquakes and mud slides (made all the more devastating because buildings are often made from mud bricks). When disasters hit, the normal procedure in these countries is to call in the military to preserve order and help pick up the pieces. We take care of this mission in a very different way. Our national military normally does not get involved. Rather, our National Guard units in the states are trained to handle the aftermath of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the like.

We decided to hold conferences on disaster assistance in some of these countries. They brought their fire, police, emergency service units, and military; we brought experts from the U.S., who showed them how to intermix the civilian and military and cooperate with each other; and we did all this in the name of the U.S. ambassadors.

We held other conferences in the region on environmental security issues — justifying them from the point of view that the military had to be good stewards of the environment, too. (We actually have many restrictions aimed at protecting the environment; and, of course, military training can damage it.) And sometimes the military is called in to police the environment — oil spills, violation of protected fisheries, hazardous waste, and so on.

In organizing environmental security conferences, the term “security” was key. An “environmental” conference on disposing of hazardous waste, for example, would not have played well back at the Pentagon. We had to have a “military” or “security” connection. Armed with that, we could bring in the EPA to talk about how to deal with hazardous waste material. Then I could bring in the ambassador and expand the conference to other issues — even human rights. (Human rights issues are very important militarily when you are trying to teach the importance of “winning hearts and minds” to military forces with no history of these considerations in their operations.)

All of these forms of engagement build strong relationships with the various countries. They tie in important military and nonmilitary programs. And from there we are able to move on to more sophisticated joint training and military assistance projects that promote strong military-to-military relationships and build better capabilities. Everybody benefits.

Not everybody back home saw things that way. The struggle went on and on between those longing to lean forward into the world and to do what we could to shape it, and the isolationist passion to block all that.[74]

During the nearly fifteen years since the end of the Cold War, talking heads and op-ed writers have spilt a lot of words on the “emergence of the American Empire.”

We are the last-man-standing superpower. No other nation or combination of nations can seriously threaten the existence of the United States (though people who can grievously hurt us are working night and day to accomplish that aim). History suggests that the eight-hundred-pound gorilla among nations will eventually yield to the temptation to defend itself, protect its interests, maintain stability, and keep itself on top by gradually taking ever greater control (direct or indirect) beyond its immediate borders. It begins to impose its will by direct force, unilaterally. Because it has the power to change distasteful situations or governments on its own, it asserts that power. The gorilla metamorphoses into an octopus, with ever-stretching tentacles. It becomes an empire.[75]

“Is that the destiny of the United States?” many have asked.

In my view, it’s not likely… I pray not.

The truth is more subtle and complex.

True, the United States is now in a situation that is historically unprecedented. No nation has ever wielded such physical power, and the capability to project that power quickly anywhere in the world.

Yet, also true, no great power has ever before existed in such interdependence with so many other nations. No nation today can go it alone — economically, politically, diplomatically, culturally, or religiously.

The word empire does not cover this case. I don’t know of any word that does. We are not an empire of conquest, occupation, or colonies. We are in a new relationship with a new kind of world. If I were to risk putting a label on America’s new position in this world, I’d call us “an empire of influence.”

For the CINCs, our strategies are operational models — policy where the boots hit the ground. Once the CINCs have drawn their regional strategies out of the realities of their AORs and the global strategy of the President, they then have to implement them. Since doing that depends on the vicissitudes of Washington politics and the often dysfunctional Washington bureaucracy, and not on the intent of the President, executing our strategy was, at times, a frustrating process. We’d have a charter from the President that told us to go out somewhere and do such and so, and then we’d get our knees cut out from under us before we could go out and do it. Since the Congress tended to fall more in the isolationist camp, they usually resisted the President’s engagement policies… meaning, practically, that we didn’t get the resources we needed to do what the President wanted done or we would get ill-thought-out sanctions or restrictions that were counterproductive and limited our ability to engage.

Though I’ve had many disagreements with the Clinton administration, its basic global strategy was right. I was out in the world and saw the needs, the newly emerging conditions, and how we can help to change them. I also saw that if we failed to change them, we were doomed to live with the tragic consequences.

I believe that military force does not solve every problem, nor is it our only form of power. There are other kinds of pressure and other kinds of support. In order to achieve our national goals, we have to combine every capability in our national bag in the most artful mix possible. But that’s hard when the political infighting spills over into the implementation end of policy.

The Washington bureaucracy was too disjointed to make the vision of all the strategies, from the President’s to the CINCs’, a reality. There was no single authority in the bureaucracy to coordinate the significant programs we CINCs designed. The uncoordinated funding, policy decisions, authority, assigned geography, and many other issues separated State, Defense, Congress, the National Security Council, and other government agencies and made it difficult to pull complex engagement plans together.

To further complicate matters, the CINCs don’t control their own resources. Their budgets come out of the service budgets; and these are controlled by the Service Chiefs (who are also double-hatted as the Joint Chiefs), who, understandably, don’t want to give up their resources to the CINCs. The Service Chiefs have minimal interest in, and little insight into, engagement programs. They’re trying to run their services, and that job’s hard enough without other burdens. Their purpose and function is to train, organize, and equip forces for the CINCs, but what they actually want to do is provide these forces where, when, and how they see best. In other words, CINCs are demanding forces and resources for purposes that the Service Chiefs may not support. Thus the CINC is an impediment — and even a threat — and the rising power of the CINCs reduces the powers of the Service Chiefs. It’s a zero-sum game.

Looking at the problem from the other side, the CINCs see the Service Chiefs as standing in the way of what they desperately need; and they are frustrated by the chiefs’ inability to fully cooperate with them or support their strategies. The CINCs want to see their money identified and set aside in a specific budget line, so they know what they have. For all kinds of reasons, the Department of Defense is reluctant to do this.

The result is constant friction between the CINCs and Washington.

This is not a case of good guys and bad guys. The CINCs and the Service Chiefs are all fine men, doing the best jobs they can do. The Service Chiefs have a legitimate case. They’re responsible for training, organizing, and equipping their forces. The CINCs have a legitimate case. They’re responsible for employing or fighting their forces and for finding the resources to implement the President’s policies out in the world day to day. These two responsibilities don’t come together. The Washington bureaucracy has not been able to devise a coherent, cohesive way to make the system work.

This frustration was often voiced by the CINCs at their conferences in Washington, but to no avail. Washington issues and Service Chiefs’ issues seemed to take priority over the CINCs’ concerns.

I’d like to suggest changes that might fix the system.

First, I would change the composition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I’d make them truly “joint.”

Currently, the Joint Chiefs are simply the Service Chiefs wearing another hat now and again during the week. They’re not really “Joint” Chiefs; they’re Service Chiefs. Their first priority is to look out for their own services. Most of them have had no real “joint” experience in actual joint operations.

A better way to select Joint Chiefs would be to create a separate body, choosing it from former Service Chiefs and former CINCs, after they’ve served their tours. That would allow people with top-level experience from both worlds to pull the system together.

Looking at this idea more closely, you obviously can’t have serving CINCs as Joint Chiefs of Staff. They’re already all over the world doing their thing. Service Chiefs likewise have a full-time job in Washington as Service Chiefs (though they’ll fight hard to keep their Joint Chiefs hats, because a lot of power comes with the job). But by selecting the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of the pool of former CINCs and former Service Chiefs, you would create a full-time dedicated organization without most of the temptations to which both CINCs and Service Chiefs can fall victim. Yet you would benefit from the enormous wealth of knowledge and experience they all represent. And they would be truly joint. This body would advise the Secretary of Defense, testify before Congress, and bring together all the relevant issues.

Two, where the CINCs’ resources and their engagement programs are concerned, I think we ought to bite the bullet and identify the money and set the budget for whatever we want to call engagement. It should be out there, transparent, and separate from the service budgets. That way the CINCs would know exactly what they have, and the services would know exactly what they have.

Three, we need mechanisms to pull all the separate elements together. We need a body to oversee coordination, set priorities, and manage results. That way, if somebody comes in with a program (a CINC, an ambassador, etc.), that body reviews and approves it, and is responsible for making sure the other agencies of government meet the time lines and the commitment to get it done. Thus, our programs would no longer be disparate and fragmented, we’d be looking at them in a holistic way.

In other words, we would be doing for government what the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the military. We’d be making government joint.

In late January 1998, my CENTCOM conference in Tampa put the final touches on the new strategy. Attendees included our commanders, staff, security assistance personnel,[76] and diplomats assigned to the region and from the State Department. Many U.S. ambassadors were present, as were the Assistant Secretaries of State who directed the regional sections at the State Department that involved our AOR.[77]

By the end of the conference, we had full agreement on the new strategy.

My concluding direction to all was to make the strategy real. It couldn’t be a nicely worded document that sat on the shelf and had no relationship to our daily actions. We had to live it day to day. Everything we did had to be related to our articulated strategic goals.

PUTTING OUT FIRES

My years at CENTCOM ranged from eventful, to hectic, to tumultuous — with crisis as our “normal” operating condition. We had the WMD inspectors’ crisis with Iraq; India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, fighting continued in Kashmir, and a coup in Pakistan brought General Pervez Musharraf to power; Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war; Al Qaeda swaggered onto the world stage with embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (followed up by the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, soon after I left CENTCOM); the running sore of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly affected every country in the region; and the region was simmering with lesser destabilizing crises such as border and ethnic disputes.

I met with local people from all levels of society to get a variety of views on issues. I didn’t just want the views of leaders. Our ambassadors were very helpful in getting me these contacts and arranging the meetings that gave me a full sense of the key issues in the region.

Managing the many crises we faced often required my presence close to the scene. But I also traveled frequently to the region on “listening” trips, building personal relationships, and experiencing the various cultures firsthand (following Joe Hoar’s advice). I spent over seventy percent of my time as CINC on the road; and I truly enjoyed my trips to the region. My visits to Washington were not so enjoyable, though the meetings with Pentagon staff, the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and the President were necessary… and sometimes productive. But it was always good to get back to CENTCOM after Washington trips. I couldn’t have asked for better bosses or supporters in D.C. (especially Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton); but, as ever, the system, bureaucracy, and politics were not for me.

My first trips as CINC to the AOR were dedicated to building relationships. I insisted on taking no issues to the regional leaders on the initial trips (and fought off those with lists of demands, requests, and points to be made). I was not going out there to talk business. I wanted to listen to the concerns of the people and hear their views of our role. It was an enlightening experience: Meetings with heads of state such as President Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and King Hussein of Jordan were a novelty for me, but I found it easy to engage these personable leaders.

I found on my journeys that our commitment to stability in the region was widely appreciated, but our policies and priorities were sometimes questioned. Views of the threats varied greatly, as did opinions about handling them. The principal complaint was our failure to consult with them not only during but between crises. The first was a bad lapse, though understandable; the second was more serious, though far less obvious. What they were saying is that building trusting relationships as a normal state of affairs would make working together in crises far easier and more productive. I promised to remedy that situation at my level.

Another — and related — complaint (echoing Ed Fugit and Joe Hoar): American leaders only blew in and out of the region when they had business to conduct, leaving no opportunity to establish the personal relationships that are critical and necessary in that part of the world. I also promised to do what I could to remedy that. Here I was thankful for Bill Cohen and Hugh Shelton, who accepted my request to come to the region often and establish the close, personal relationships we needed. Regional leaders were appreciative of their visits and personal connections. This paid dividends during crises when we needed regional cooperation.

As the coming months turned hectic, I was glad I had made my “listening” tours. It made the cooperation we badly needed from regional leaders far easier to gain.

On the twenty-sixth of November 1997, I was called to the Pentagon to hold a press briefing on the Iraq crisis, the first of many press contacts as CINC.

Though I don’t bask in the glow of press attention (I can take it or leave it), I know how important it is to deal honestly and honorably with members of the media, the vast majority of whom are responsible professionals who provide the window of transparency without which a democracy cannot exist. With only a few exceptions, they have treated me fairly. Their interest on the whole has been based on a desire to report and understand, and not to promote a particular agenda…

But a few of them can be pains in the ass — or, worse, irresponsible, shallow, dishonest, or hypocritical. I imagine the ratio of good to bad is not different from any other community.

The Washington bureaucracy has always been more frightened of the media than those of us with field commands. Washington knee-jerks to daily consolidated press clippings, put together each morning by the various government departments’ public affairs offices. For DOD, the consolidated morning clippings were called “the Early Bird.” I could be virtually certain that any questions, ass-chewing, or directions I was going to get on any given day had been driven by the Early Bird.

I quickly learned that leverage with the media came from the access I could grant or withhold. If a reporter reported accurately, even if the resulting story was not favorable, I made sure I granted as much access as I had time to give. If the reporting was not accurate, that ended my contact with the reporter. To this day, there are a handful of reporters, newspapers, or even networks that I won’t deal with.

At press conferences, I’ve always tried to answer questions with short declarative sentences. I hate rambling, vague, bureaucratic answers that avoid direct responses to questions. This era of “spin” sickens me. I would never have accepted a White House “spin doctor” being assigned to my command to run our public affairs effort, as was done during the Iraq war.

Nineteen ninety-eight was a year of nearly continuous turmoil.

It started in Africa.

Though many in Washington see little in the way of vital national interests there, I had long felt that we have important concerns in that continent that merit using our national resources — not to mention our obligation to help the enormous humanitarian needs. Our efforts in Africa have been woefully short of what we should be doing.

On a trip I made to Africa early in January, our ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, briefed me on a developing crisis in that country. Severe flooding was washing out roads and bridges, and several hundred thousand people were in danger of being cut off from their sources of food, potable water, and medicine. Because the Kenyans were ill equipped to meet the emergency airlift demands to move emergency supplies, I agreed to send our Special Operations Command (SOCENT) team, supported by a USAF C-130, to assess the situation and then to deploy a Humanitarian Assessment Support Team (HAST) to handle the humanitarian crisis. I had tasked SOCENT to establish a trained HAST ready to go on a moment’s notice if a humanitarian crisis developed.

The situation in Kenya quickly worsened; the floodwaters continued to rage; and over 300,000 people were in immediate danger of starving or succumbing to disease. But the Pentagon was reluctant to help them; the mission cost too much, and they didn’t want to use our military. I persisted, the “Five-Sided Labyrinth” eventually yielded, and I ordered CENTCOM’s Marine component to deploy a task force to Kenya. I had also tasked our Marine component with the responsibility to respond to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in East Africa. This mission, known as “Operation Noble Response,” saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans and cost $800,000. Saving so many lives has rarely come so cheaply.

At the end of March, I made a trip to the region, primarily to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Bahrain. My purpose was to bring the six GCC countries[78] together to work security issues collectively. Previously, we had almost always done business with each country individually. I wanted to change that. I wanted our regional allies to begin to think collectively about security issues.

Since our biggest obstacle was the reluctance of the Arab countries to embark on a collective security relationship with the U.S., I knew it would take time to develop what I hoped to achieve. Nevertheless, I felt that if I could put issues of common interest on the table as starting points, and get agreement on these, we’d at least be moving down the right path. I found two such issues — theater missile defense, and environmental security.

The members of the GCC could not fail to be aware that the growing missile proliferation in the region was a real problem, and they all knew they needed a coordinated regional defensive capability to deal with such threats. We had therefore proposed that the U.S. provide the technology and organization skills to pull it all together, and they had agreed to discuss this at the conference.

But first we had to steer through their instinctive suspicion of our motives. Some saw our proposal as an attempt to rope them into buying high-cost U.S. systems, while others saw it as a scheme to pull them into an arrangement that specified a particular enemy. Yet once these suspicions were allayed, the conference really took off… especially when we offered to share early warning information. Since we obviously had the best information against missile and air threats, it made sense for us to provide it in a cooperative defense arrangement. Though some of the council didn’t believe we would actually give up this information, I explained that this was not only a matter of trust but in our own interest, since it would help protect our military in the region.

Though we had a few rocky moments, the conference was a success. It was followed by a series of other conferences to further develop the initial concepts and capabilities.

In order to keep this momentum going, I decided to schedule another conference on a different issue — environmental security. The Omanis agreed to host it. Again, it was a success.

After the conferences ended, I visited Qatar, where the foreign minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim, persuaded me to give an interview to the notoriously controversial Qatar-based network, Al Jazeera. Since I didn’t want to be baited or set up in an unfriendly interview broadcast throughout the region, I was reluctant to do it.

Hamad didn’t deny that the interview could be rough, yet he explained that the region badly needed to see the “human face” of the U.S. military. So I went ahead with it… with no regrets. The interview was tough but fair. And the interviewer’s probing questions about ethical considerations in our military operations allowed me to show that human face. Afterward, I agreed to do several more interviews. One interview was videoed by an Iraqi crew who gave me a thumbs-up from behind the camera every time I blasted Saddam.

During the second week of April, I attended the annual Emerald Express Conference (which I had started when I commanded I MEF). What I hoped would come out of the conference was the start of a cooperative regional capability for peacekeeping and the humanitarian mission.

Since Africa has never received much attention from Washington, and it was split between CENTCOM and EUCOM, progress was not going to come easily. When my early attempts to start a coordinated, more expansive program for African engagement did not work out, I decided to piece together a CENTCOM program, focused on peacekeeping and humanitarian capabilities developed with the African countries in our AOR.

This program had three major elements.

The first was the African Crisis Response Initiatives (ACRI), set up earlier by our government for low-level (small unit and individual) training and equipping of African military forces for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. This program was very rudimentary, and its value was overinflated by our government. It was a solid beginning; yet it wasn’t enough. We needed a larger operational element, consisting of major exercises and significant field training at the battalion level and for the staffs; we needed to work in a real environment; and we needed actual applications, using, for example, real veterinarians, dentists, and doctors in real situations.

With these thoughts in mind, I decided to build on ACRI by adding an annual brigade-sized exercise with African and U.S. forces. The exercise, called “Natural Fire,” was designed to bring together regional forces in a realistic peacekeeping and humanitarian operations task that they would work in conjunction with NGOs and international relief organizations. I further combined into this our medical, dental, and veterinarian training, in order to gain the goodwill these provided in the African villages in the exercise area.

Then we needed a third element at the strategic, policy level. That is, we needed to bring in senior political officials, senior NGOs, and senior military to talk about how to make the big operational strategic decisions, and bring the different elements into cooperation on the ground. This was supposed to be the function of Emerald Express.

Once these elements were in place, I hoped to broaden the program into a model for all Africa, and tie it in with the newly formed (and U.S. DOD-sponsored) African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS)[79] to further develop policy issues and reinforce Emerald Express. The truly superb director of the ACSS, Nancy Walker, enthusiastically and skillfully supported our efforts.

Among the attendees at Emerald Express for whom I had special hopes were General Tsadkan of Ethiopia and General Shebat of Eritrea, the heads of the militaries in their countries. These two old friends (and friends of mine) had fought and won the two-decade “Long Struggle” against the oppressive Menguistu regime in Ethiopia; and both had wonderful tales of their rough days in the bush during the guerrilla war.

I was keenly interested in helping their two militaries, and saw a further opportunity to stabilize their portion of the troubled Horn of Africa if I could persuade them to sign on to our proposed cooperative regional initiative. But neither showed much interest in that. I figured they were still consumed with their internal issues after emerging from twenty-plus years of warfare and devastation.

A few months later, their two countries staggered into a tragic war; and the two old friends became enemies.

The one nation that took to my plan was Kenya. General Tonje, the strong and impressive leader of Kenya’s military, had instituted deep reforms that had transformed that organization into a noncorrupt and professional force. At the conference, he and President Moi proposed that we run the program through the East African Community (EAC), a regional political organization that included Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. This was a good idea, but unfortunately unworkable, since Uganda and Tanzania were not in CENTCOM’s AOR. When I asked if they could be assigned to us, EUCOM objected. And when we then tried to run the program jointly with EUCOM, it only barely got off the ground… Those parts of the program that were run in Kenya through the EAC were very successful.

Meanwhile, confusion had crept in about the directions and goals of Emerald Express.

Pacific Command and the Marine Corps (for various legitimate reasons) were claiming part ownership of the conference, while providing very little in the way of funds to support it — most of which were coming from CENTCOM. Their idea was to shift the focus of the conference to their own particular areas of interest. Though I didn’t object to their participation, I was not happy to see the shift away from the areas where CENTCOM had concerns.

I therefore decided to make changes to Emerald Express that would reorient it into a solely CENTCOM affair, focused on Africa, and held somewhere in our African region. I MEF agreed to keep sponsorship and run the conference, which was renamed “Golden Spear.” It provided a high-level, intergovernmental forum for discussions on planning and lessons-learned development for several types of engagement missions. Kenya agreed to cohost the first Golden Spear conference.

When I returned from Emerald Express, I learned that the CENTCOM AOR had grown. We’d been assigned the Central Asian region that included the countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. We soon began taking on new challenges presented by this assignment.

Later in April, Senator Ted Stevens led a seven-senator congressional delegation (CODEL) to the Gulf to look at gaining more burden-sharing support from Persian Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, for our ongoing military enforcement of sanctions against Iraq.

I picked up the CODEL in my plane (an ancient Boeing 707) and took them to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we met the Saudi Minister of Defense, Prince Sultan, and the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar. Since I was certain that the CODEL was unaware of the support we were actually receiving from the Saudis, I prefaced the meeting with a briefing that covered the hundreds of millions of dollars of direct support we received each year in fuel, food, water, etc., as well as the additional hundreds of millions the Saudis had spent to build a state-of-the-art housing facility for our forces. We also received indirect support from Saudi purchases of U.S. defense equipment. And, finally, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations had provided troops and funding support for our missions in places like Somalia. This information (obviously unexpected) satisfied the CODEL; the Minister of Defense followed this up with a show of personal support and friendship for CENTCOM.

Early May. In response to an Indian nuclear weapons test, Pakistan was scheduled to test their own nuclear weapon, an act that would drastically escalate tensions in the region — and the world.

In an effort to persuade the Pakistanis not to test, the State Department planned to send Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot and the Assistant Secretary for the region, Rick Inderfer, to meet Prime Minister Sharif and the senior Pakistani leadership. I was to accompany them.

The mission was not going to be easy. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan were already tense. The Pakistanis had backed our efforts in Afghanistan during the Afghan rebellion against the Soviets; there were now a large number of refugees — and a state of chaos — on their western border as a result; and we had (in their view) dumped them.

Their bitterness had increased when we imposed sanctions over their WMD program. Specifically, we had refused to deliver F-16s they had bought and paid for, or even to return their money; and then we’d deducted storage fees for the planes from what they had paid. No surprise: They were enraged. (The anger was compounded after many pilots flying older planes were lost, which wouldn’t have happened if they’d had the F-16s.)

Our treatment of Pakistan was working against our interest. This was a state on the edge; the government was shaky and badly corrupt; and politically powerful Islamists inflamed the population. If Pakistan failed, or turned into an Iranian- or Afghan-style theocracy, we would have major problems in the region… and beyond. We did not want nuclear-armed Islamist radicals. Then or now.

The delegation flew to Tampa to join me on the twenty-two-hour flight to Islamabad. As we prepared to board the CENTCOM 707, word came that the Pakistani government had decided not to approve the visit. This triggered a flurry of diplomatic calls from the waiting room at our air base… made more urgent by the approach of our drop-dead takeoff time. If we didn’t get in the air within two hours, our crew time would run out.

When the calls kept getting negative results, I decided to propose to Secretary Talbot a back-channel approach. If I called General Jehangir Karamat, the chief of staff of the Pakistan military, I thought he would okay the trip. Karamat was a man of great honor and integrity, and a friend. Relations with Pakistan hung on the thin thread of a personal relationship that General Karamat and I agreed to maintain.

“Go ahead,” the Secretary told me, though his face was skeptical.

But when I called General Karamat, he promised to take care of the problem; and a few minutes later we were in the air… further proof, if the Secretary needed it, that the relationship between our two militaries remained strong, in spite of the strained relationships elsewhere. Though Washington had severely limited the military-to-military connections I could make, I had insisted on maintaining that personal connection to General Karamat.

In Pakistan, we met several times with Prime Minister Sharif and his ministers, but were unable to convince them not to test. The domestic pressure to respond to the Indian tests was too great.

As we left, I had a few private moments with General Karamat, who shared with me his frustration with his corrupt government. Pakistan’s military leaders had more than once seized power from the elected government. Though others in the military had urged him to follow that tradition, he assured me he could never do that. He kept his word; but that did not stop a military coup later that year.

In mid-May, shooting incidents in Badime, a disputed border area between Ethiopia and Eritrea, had caused the Eritreans to attack in force and seize the area. The Ethiopians were mobilizing for a counterattack.

On the eighteenth, I called General Tsadkan, to get his take on the situation. According to my Ethiopian friend, his old friend General Shebat had been visiting him to celebrate the belated graduation of his wife from college (after leaving college decades before to join the political struggle, she had finally returned to complete her degree). According to Tsadkan, Shebat had abruptly walked out of the celebration; and the attack had come the next day. It was a stab in the back. He was predictably outraged.

Needless to say, when I called General Shebat on the twentieth, he gave me a different version of these events. He claimed the attack had come in response to a series of violent incidents staged by the Ethiopians.

Wherever the truth lay, it was tragic that these two old friends, who had suffered so much side by side, couldn’t work out this quarrel peacefully.

As tensions worsened, Susan Rice, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, asked me to intervene; and she and I worked together to try calm everybody down… but with no success. Over the next months, the crisis grew to critical mass and exploded. All we could do in response was plan a precautionary Non-combatant Evacuation Operation.

Happily, many of our relationships in the region were actually improving — some after years of conflict. One of the more notable turnarounds came from Yemen. After years of civil war had devastated the country, the nation was now united. But a stupid decision to support Iraq during the Gulf War had soured relations with the U.S. Earlier that year, however, Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, had sent word that he was looking to mend fences and begin a cooperative military-to-military relationship with the U.S. This was good news. Yemen was a strategically vital country in serious danger of becoming a failed state. Helping Yemen was critical to our security interests in the region.

I visited Yemen on May 22, spending several days with President Saleh and his ministers. Because he had no ability to control his borders and coast, or to effectively act against the terrorist groups who freely transited the country and used it as a base, Saleh desperately needed help in training his counterterrorist forces. And of course, he desperately needed a Coast Guard.

I added several other Security Assistance programs to his wish list, as well as an intelligence-sharing program.

Again, these actions brought forth little support from Washington. I was nevertheless determined to build this relationship. It was in the region’s, and our own, security interests.

While I was in Yemen, I toured the port of Aden, where new construction and refueling sites were being examined by our naval component as a potential replacement for the refueling stop at Djibouti, where there were significant security problems. I liked what I saw. The refueling site was away from any piers; the actual refueling could be accomplished out in the harbor at a secure distance from sea traffic; and initial reports from the DOD experts about fuel quality and quantity were encouraging.

In July, we received two notable visitors at CENTCOM headquarters — Prince Abdullah of Jordan and General Altynbayev, the Kazakhstan Minister of Defense.

A bright, vibrant young leader with innovative ideas, Abdullah was at that time the head of the Jordanian Special Forces. Inevitably, our conversation turned to the failing health of his father, King Hussein, who had long been fighting cancer. The cancer was worsening; it was clear the king would soon be dead.

For many years, Hussein’s brother had been designated as next in line to the throne; but that was soon to change. Though the king was about to change his pick to Abdullah, the prince had had no indication of that. It was a splendid choice. He has proved to be one of the most enlightened leaders in his part of the world.

General Altynbayev was the first Central Asian official I had met since the five former Soviet states were assigned to the CENTCOM AOR. As he and I talked, I quickly realized that these states were going to pose very different problems from the other subregions of our AOR — problems that were more related to their former rule by Moscow than to their religion or ethnicity (though these issues were also very much present). I looked forward to a visit to the Stans later that year.

At the end of July, on another trip to Pakistan, I visited some of the more remote and rugged parts of the country — the Line of Control Area of Kashmir and the nearby Siachen glacier, and the fabled Khyber Pass on the western border with Afghanistan. In these wild mountains, Pakistani and Indian troops had faced off against each other for decades at altitudes in excess of twenty thousand feet. If the fighting didn’t kill you, the weather and altitude did. To my surprise, the two countries had, for the most part, succeeded in containing the fighting to this dangerous and volatile, yet well-defined, area. But that “happy” situation was going to change in a matter of months.

At the Khyber Pass, I gained a greater understanding of Pakistan’s rugged western border with Afghanistan-remote hostile tribes, a territory not fully subject to Pakistani law or control, and a truly tough mountainous terrain. By then, I had a solid sense of how the ruinous rule of the Taliban was destroying that country and the sanctuary they provided extremists like Al Qaeda presented a growing and exceptionally dangerous threat.

We learned how serious it was on the seventh of August, when our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were hit by suicide truck bombs. Twelve Americans (including three members of our CENTCOM Security Assistance team) and 234 locals were killed in the attacks, and over 5,000 were wounded. The attacks were conducted by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist group.

We immediately sent a Fleet Antiterrorist Support Team (FAST), from the Marines, Navy engineer units, and medical units to meet the emergency needs; and I dispatched a team to Nairobi from our headquarters to function as a Joint Task Force Command Element to determine what else was needed. All of this became “Operation Resolute Response.”

The attack did not come as a total surprise. We had already learned from President Moi several months earlier that Muslim extremists were operating in his country and in neighboring Somalia, and that terrorist activities were becoming a grave threat to East, Central, and West Africa.

In February, acting on a request from our ambassador in Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, I had sent a message to the Secretary of State warning of the vulnerability of the Nairobi embassy to car bomb attacks (it was located on one of Nairobi’s busiest thoroughfares) and offering to help with a security assessment and recommendations. The State Department reply essentially told me that my help was not needed — the same message the ambassador had got when she’d tried to catch Washington’s attention before coming to me.

When a reporter somehow dug up the basic contents of the message, there was a small crisis in Washington; but, to my amazement, the State Department just blew it off, and the issue died.

This was just as well. We had a much larger question to answer: What to do about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? In those days, we knew that they were a growing threat, but we did not know how dangerous they would become. Yet on the evidence of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, “dangerous” might be too mild a word. Clearly, we had to counterattack. But that was not going to be easy. Al Qaeda has never been a “place” that we could easily target; it’s a network, a web. And Osama has always been elusive. We did know that Al Qaeda had facilities in Afghanistan; and our intelligence agencies knew Osama was then located somewhere near these facilities; but there was no way we could locate his day-to-day position.

By mid-August, additional intelligence suggested that bin Laden might be visiting one of his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. I was ordered to prepare Tomahawk missile strikes on the camp and on a target in Khartoum, Sudan. (According to our intelligence, this was a pharmaceutical plant that produced a precursor used to develop toxic chemical agents for terrorist organizations.) The strikes were scheduled for August 20.

The Sudan target was new to me; I had not yet seen them mentioned in our intel assessments, but the evidence of its terrorist use seemed highly reliable.

The training camps were rough-and-ready facilities that did not offer high-value targets in terms of infrastructure, and the odds of getting bin Laden were not good, but in my mind it was worth the shot. If he was there, and we hit him, great. If he wasn’t, then at least he’d know we could reach him. I knew it was a long shot and that if he wasn’t there we would be criticized, but I felt we had to take the shot.

The day we fired the missiles, I cleared my desk of everything but a card of thanks from the parents of Sergeant Sherry Olds, a remarkable NCO who had been killed in the Nairobi attack, for a letter I’d sent them and for our honor guard at her funeral.

This strike was called “Operation Infinite Reach.”

It did not actually do much damage, and we did receive a lot of press and political criticism for it, but in my mind it was worth doing. Intelligence came down with several other targets after these strikes, but, again, they never had the specificity or reliability that I felt warranted launching missile strikes or special operations missions. The risks to our forces or the assured collateral damage were not justified by the sketchy intel we saw in the strikes executed.

On a visit to Nairobi on the twenty-ninth of August, I promised Ambassador Bushnell that our FAST security forces would not leave until a new embassy was established — work that could not be completed for several months. I was therefore shocked a short time later when the Pentagon started pressuring me to withdraw the Marines before a new, more secure location for the embassy had been acquired.

According to the Pentagon, keeping the Marines there was too expensive, and security at the embassy was a State Department problem anyhow. “We did our part. Now it’s their business.”

“We can’t pull out,” I told them. “There is no way, shape, or form we can leave Americans exposed and in jeopardy out there.”

“Well, that’s the State Department’s problem,” the Pentagon kept saying. “They should be taking care of their people. Not us.”

I wasn’t going to let interagency bickering get in the way of protecting Americans. So I got tough. “Bullshit,” I said. “I’m not going to leave Americans in danger. Those Marines are going to stay out there until they get a suitable place to move the American embassy. I’m going to protect the Americans where they live and work. They’re still vulnerable.”

I got a lot of mumbling and grumbling from the Pentagon, but no one was going to challenge me on this.

By early September, the crisis between Ethiopia and Eritrea had grown even more alarming. It looked like war was soon coming to the Horn of Africa. In an effort to ease tensions and find a peaceful solution to the crisis, the President had designated former National Security Adviser Tony Lake to be a special envoy; and I was tasked to work with him. This effort became known as “the Tony-Tony Strategy.”

I traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea during the first week of September. In meetings over several days with Prime Minister Meles and General Tsadkan of Ethiopia and President Isaias and General Shebat of Eritrea, I tried to convince everyone that a war over Badime — a desolate and barren patch of ground on the common border — was senseless and would lead to a needless bloodbath. Everyone listened politely, but neither side was willing to compromise. It was clear they were already committed to military action. I returned to the States extremely discouraged, convinced a bloody war was approaching.

Still, I had to keep trying to prevent it.

Later in September, when I made my first visit to the Central Asian states, I found all these societies in a state of post-Soviet shock. After seventy years of communism, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Tajiks, Turkomans, and the other ethnic groups in what had once been the southern parts of the USSR had significant economic, security, political, and social problems. Now that the communist weight had been lifted from their backs, they were trying to figure out their true identity and search for the best way forward. Naturally, each looked at our new U.S. involvement as a chance to gain the support they needed to make necessary changes. And, naturally, the U.S. was once again unwilling to invest in this new region of engagement.

But the U.S. wasn’t the only barrier to progress. Each state had its own set of problems and view of the way ahead; and there was little interest in the collective, regional approach that we preferred. Thus it was clear to me that we had to begin with bilateral arrangements.

For starters, their militaries had a dire need to reform the old Soviet system, while their security concerns about the threats (extremism, drugs, and crime, primarily coming out of Afghanistan) were real. Once again, we’d be creating an engagement program with few resources, but I was determined to work with what we had. These were frontline states, extremely vulnerable to the growing forces of extremism and chaos in South Asia. It was becoming ever clearer that these threats were not just directed at them; they were also directed at us. We had to help them.

I had begun to hear the same warning from all the leaders in the region — from President Moi of Kenya to President Karamov of Uzbekistan. They were all alarmed over the spreading menace of religious extremism and terrorist activities.

Nineteen ninety-eight marked a major transition in the institutional nature of terrorism. Before 1998, terrorist bands tended to be small, disparate, and haphazardly managed… or else run by charismatic leaders. They were more likely to be gangs with gripes than organizations with plans, programs, and strategies.

Al Qaeda[80] changed all that.

The genius of Al Qaeda was to pull the disparate terrorist groups together, create a network to link them all, and provide the resources, training, command and control, and global reach to make this threat international. Al Qaeda had created what was in effect a virtual state whose base was its global network. Each part of the network was relatively weak, insignificant, and vulnerable; but because of the invisibility and security of the links, the threat from the network had soon reached an unprecedented level.

This was far from the threat of world annihilation that we had endured for the nearly fifty years of the Cold War; yet the dangers from an Al Qaeda allowed to grow unchecked were far from small.

In connection with an October 21 trip to Washington for Senate testimony, I was asked by the DOD public relations office to hold a press conference at a Defense Writers’ Group breakfast.

During the session, I took questions about some exiled, London-based Iraqi opposition groups that had become the apple of Congress’s eye. The most prominent of these, the Iraqi National Congress, was led by Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi had conned several senior people into believing that he could spark a guerrilla movement that would sweep Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athists from power — if only he had a lot of money and a little specialoperations and air support. I thought this idea was totally mad (our intelligence had reported that nothing the INC said was trustworthy and none of their plans were viable).

The October press conference was not my first encounter with this idiocy. On the twenty-sixth of March, I had traveled to Washington for my annual congressional testimony.

CINCs are required to give annual testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, House Armed Services Committee, and House Appropriations Committee,[81] but are often also called during the year to give testimony on specific issues as they come up. At our annual testimony, we’d generally provide a status of our command and region and respond to questions. Most questions related to pet programs or issues that individual legislators wanted to promote or challenge; but some made a political point about the administration’s policies.

The issue at the March sessions was the administration’s policy in Iraq. Congress was brewing its own strategy, cooked up by a couple of Senate staffers, promoting the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi’s guerrilla plans. I testified then that there was no chance that this operation could succeed. Saddam was too firmly entrenched to be dislodged by a handful of guerrilla bands, and Chalabi’s organization was a sham.

Naturally, my reluctance to get on board a boat I didn’t think would float did not endear me to Chalabi’s backers, many of whom, such as Senator John McCain, were powerful in Washington. And when I offered these views, I could tell Defense Secretary Cohen was not comfortable. Though the Clinton administration was extremely leery about dealing with Chalabi, any plan that promised to get rid of Saddam played in the media like motherhood and free speech, so the administration was not eager to seem to oppose it. That evening, out on the steps of the Capitol, Secretary Cohen told me to stick to military execution of policy and stay out of policy development. The rebuke was polite, but I got the message.

Congress had passed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which applied $97 million to Iraqi opposition groups, including Chalabi’s.

The administration still did not want to touch this issue. But they had no intention of spending the money on the Iraqi opposition (except for minor administrative support). They were not about to actually buy them weapons.

But by October the two Senate staffers I’d run into in March, now working with a retired Army general, had actually come up with a crazy plan to arm the “military branches” of these dissidents and insert them into Iraq with promises from us of air cover and special forces support. It was a recipe for disaster, which I referred to at the press conference as “the Bay of Goats,” adding further insult by calling the exiles “Gucci Guerrillas.”

These comments caused a furor, and during my Senate testimony later that day I faced several angry Senators who supported this ludicrous proposal.

Though I was severely chewed out by my bosses afterward, I received hundreds of letters and calls, and several articles were written, in support of my position.

The story does not end there. Washington is a vindictive town, and the two staffers swore revenge. They did not take it out on me, but on my political adviser, Larry Pope. When Pope was nominated for Ambassador to Kuwait, they were able to block a Senate vote on it. This petty act against a man who had nothing to do with my opinions was typical of the Washington politics that sickened me.

Nineteen ninety-eight ended with a bang with Desert Fox.

I knew we’d get no respite from the constant high-level tempo of operations in 1999.

In early January, the administration directed Tony Lake to make another effort (which we supported) to broker peace in the looming Ethiopia-Eritrea war; yet I knew we were not going to stop the impending fight. When the war actually began in the spring of 1999, we conducted an evacuation of American citizens (called “Operation Safe Departure”).

The war was bloody. World War One-style trench warfare and massive frontal attacks caused thousands of deaths.

After an Ethiopian victory at Badime (by which time the two belligerents had exhausted themselves on the battlefield), we worked with Tony Lake and the State Department to establish a peacekeeping force there. By the end of the year, a UN force provided a boundary demarcation team and peacekeepers to try to help resolve the dispute.

On the twenty-first of April, I traveled to Pakistan for several days of meetings with the new chief of staff, General Pervez Musharraf. The two of us connected quickly and easily. He was bright, sincere, and personable. A fervent nationalist who nevertheless leaned toward the West, he was as appalled as General Karamat over the ever-worsening corruption within the civilian government. He also understood the various, powerful Islamist currents running through his country, and saw them as the threats they were to bringing his country into the twenty-first century; yet he also understood that his country would never modernize and solve its myriad ills without the emergence of some kind of religious accommodation, and hopefully religious consensus.

It was a great meeting, despite the chill cast by our sanctions. As I was leaving, we both agreed to stay in close touch (we exchanged our home telephone numbers). Our friendship would later prove to be enormously valuable to both our countries.

In May, Pakistani forces made a deep incursion into an area called Kargil, on the Indian side of the Line of Control.

Though there was normally “fighting” near the Line of Control, the area for a long time had been quite stable. There’d be probes and shooting during the good months of the year, but nothing ever changed much; and in wintertime, everybody would pull back down into the valleys, and the two sides would create a “no-man’s-land.” As spring came, they’d go back up into their positions.

Every so often, somebody on one side would be a little late getting up to their spring position, and the other side could grab an advantage of a kilometer or so. It was like “Aha, I’ve gotcha!” on a tactical level. But it didn’t really change things.

This time, however, the Pakistanis waylaid the Indians and penetrated all the way to Kargil. This was such a deep, significant penetration that it wasn’t tactical; it threatened Indian lines of communication and support up to Siachen glacier.

The Indians came back with a vengeance. There were exchanges of fire, there was a mobilization of forces, there were bombing attacks, planes were shot down. Then the two sides started to mobilize all their forces all along the line; and it was beginning to look like the opening moves of a larger war. It got alarming.

I was therefore directed by the administration to head a presidential mission to Pakistan to convince Prime Minister Sharif and General Musharraf to withdraw their forces from Kargil.

I met with the Pakistani leaders in Islamabad on June 24 and 25 and put forth a simple rationale for withdrawing: “If you don’t pull back, you’re going to bring war and nuclear annihilation down on your country. That’s going to be very bad news for everybody.” Nobody actually quarreled with this rationale. The problem for the Pakistani leadership was the apparent national loss of face. Backing down and pulling back to the Line of Control looked like political suicide. We needed to come up with a face-saving way out of this mess. What we were able to offer was a meeting with President Clinton, which would end the isolation that had long been the state of affairs between our two countries, but we would announce the meeting only after a withdrawal of forces.

That got Musharraf’s attention; and he encouraged Prime Minister Sharif to hear me out.

Sharif was reluctant to withdraw before the meeting with Clinton was announced (again, his problem was maintaining face); but after I insisted, he finally came around and he ordered the withdrawal. We set up a meeting with Clinton in July.

In October 1999, the tension between the civilian and military leadership of Pakistan finally came to a head. The government was freely elected but outrageously corrupt. The military found itself between a rock and a hard place. If they let the situation continue, the rot could grow bad enough that the country would collapse — a very real possibility. But there was no way to change this situation according to the normal liberal democratic rules.

Sharif set in motion his own downfall by trying to fire General Musharraf, while Musharraf was out of the country, and to put the chief of intelligence in his place. He had originally given Musharraf the job under the misperception that Musharraf would be easy to control. He had not reckoned on the general’s integrity.

In response to Sharif’s move, the Pakistani army executed a coup.

While the coup was moving to its climax, Musharraf was flying home; and for him, success was a very near thing. His aircraft came back into the country low on fuel; but the airports, still under the control of Sharif’s forces, were closed to him. At the last possible moment, forces friendly to Musharraf took over the airport and the general landed.

Prime Minister Sharif was soon placed under arrest, and Musharraf declared his intent to clean up governmental corruption and install true democracy.

The coup did not play well in Washington, and I was ordered to cease communications with General Musharraf. Though I thought the order was stupid, I complied.

Every other year, we conduct a joint exercise with Egypt called “Bright Star.” It is the largest military exercise in the world.[82]

In November, I was in a reviewing stand with Secretary Cohen, participating in Bright Star, when my communicator announced that a call from General Musharraf had been patched through to my satellite phone (which was with me at all times).

I turned to Cohen. “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Take the call, but don’t make any commitments,” he said.

It was a personal call between friends, Musharraf explained (though, of course, we both knew that any conversation we had would have wider ramifications). He wanted me to know what had led to the coup and why he and the other military leaders had had no choice other than the one they took.

The point he made then was a powerful one: “Democracy and the ballot are both a sham when any government that results can offer everything they control up for sale. We’ve had a democracy of form, and not a democracy of substance. I want democracy in substance, I’ll work for that, no matter what it costs me.

“And there’s one more thing I have to make clear,” he told me. “I don’t care what most others think about my motivations or intentions; but it’s important to me that you know what they are.”

I thanked him for his candor, and wished him well.

When I briefed Cohen on the call, I made it clear that it was more important than ever to stay connected to Pakistan. He understood what I was saying, but he didn’t think Washington would be convinced.

In December, Jordanian intelligence uncovered a massive plot to kill American tourists at the turn-of-millennium celebrations in Jordan and throughout the Middle East. The captured terrorists, who had links to Osama bin Laden, revealed that their immediate leaders were in Pakistan.

Calls soon came from the State Department and National Security Council: “Please call Musharraf and ask him to help.”

In response to my requests, Musharraf arrested the terrorists (and gave us access to them and to their confiscated computer disks)… and threw in several other favors.

“Now do something for Musharraf,” I told Washington. “Or at least let us reconnect.”

The answer was no.

I called Musharraf and told him how disappointed I was. “I know that cooperation isn’t popular in some circles of your own government and people, as well,” I explained. “I know what courage it took to do what you did for us. So it’s doubly embarrassing for me that I can’t give you anything in return.”

“I don’t want or expect anything for what I’ve done,” Musharraf replied. “Tony, I did it because it was the right thing to do.”

On my final trips to the region in the spring and summer of 2000, I was deeply moved by the reception I received from my many friends. Their expressions of appreciation for what we had done and the relationships we had built made me feel we were well on our way to stabilizing this volatile part of the world. I knew, however, that we had a long way to go. This was a dangerous neighborhood. The region needed to make many political, social, economic, and security reforms, but it needed time, space, and support (and, in some cases, prodding) to get these done. I felt we could help effect these changes by providing this help.

During my time at CENTCOM, every country except the Seychelles was continually under a terrorist threat. We had conducted a series of military actions against Iraq, while continuing to enforce sanctions against that nation. We had contained Iran and opened new relations with Yemen and the Central Asian States. We had dealt with wars in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Tajikistan. Our responses to crises in Pakistan, Africa, and elsewhere had ranged from humanitarian assistance, to evacuation of U.S. citizens, to mediation of disputes.

It was an incredible experience.

In the summer of 2000, I transferred command of CENTCOM to Army General Tommy Franks, and my thirty-nine-year career as a Marine ended.

But it was not the final chapter of my CENTCOM story.

On Thursday, October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists suicide-bombed the American destroyer USS Cole, then refueling in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. Seventeen young Americans were killed, and the Cole was out of action for years. Somebody had to take the blame for allowing this tragedy to take place. The buck had to stop somewhere.

Some people looked at an obvious target, the ship’s captain. But the folks who like to point fingers whenever bad things happen to our soldiers, Marines, airmen, or sailors wanted to hang somebody higher up. The finger landed on me.

Fine. That’s where the buck stopped.

So when the chief of naval operations tried to pin the bombing on me, I wasn’t surprised. He accused me of setting up the refueling station in Aden because I wanted to improve relations with Yemen.

That accusation brought on a call from Senator Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “Look,” he said, “I’m getting hammered by my constituents. They’re asking questions about the Cole. The American people need to learn the truth. We need to have the hearings. We’ve asked the Secretary of Defense and the top military to testify, but they will not appear. We can’t get them to come. That leaves you, Tony.” He apologized for that. “You need to come testify.

“It’s going to be hard,” he continued. “We’re going to put you through a lot… I’m going to put you through a lot.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. It was the only right thing to do.

I was grilled by fourteen senators, three hours under klieg lights (a lot of press was there), with no break (not even to piss). And I got hammered with questions.

Before I went in, I’d decided I would take full responsibility for this thing. I was the CINC and everything that happened in my AOR was my responsibility. If I didn’t, they’d dump it down on some poor son of a bitch like the captain of the ship. Somebody senior had to stand up. I remembered how hard they had hit General Peay for the Khobar Towers attack. When he tried to explain what happened during his testimony, they took it as waffling and not standing up to his responsibilities (which was far from the case). I was tired of admirals and generals trying to pass the buck. I was really upset with the chief of naval operations for trying to pin the blame on anybody else… it didn’t matter who. And I was enraged at the Washington blame game.

So I decided, “What the hell. The buck stops here.” And that’s what I said in my testimony: “I was the commander in chief who made the decision that we would refuel in there,” I told the senators. “I’m fine with that. If it was the wrong decision, you can hold me responsible for it.

“Now I’ll give you the circumstances, I’ll tell you what happened, and why I made the decision:

“Yes, it’s true that I wanted to improve relations with Yemen, but that was not the reason we chose to refuel in Yemen. We chose to refuel there for operational and not diplomatic or political reasons. It was the only practical port for our naval component to refuel their ships.

“The Navy has rules about fuel levels on their ships,” I explained. “In normal operations, they don’t let that level go below fifty-one percent.

“Ships traveling out of the Mediterranean could of course refuel in the Persian Gulf, but in many cases ships didn’t have enough capacity to get there without exceeding the fifty-one percent limit. That meant they had to find a refueling port between Suez and the Gulf. These were the possibilities: Djibouti, Eritrea, Jeddah, and Aden. That was it. Djibouti had been the Navy’s refueling port, but it was now a no-go. Eritrea was out because of the war with Ethiopia. Jeddah was out because we’d just had the bombings in Saudi Arabia. So there was no other choice.

“We looked hard at Aden. The Navy went in and vetted it, inspected it, and cleared it; and the Navy component for CENTCOM had the responsibility for security. We refueled twenty-eight ships during my tenure as CINC, and all without incident.

“Yet, having said that, there’s no getting around the risk. There is no risk-free place in that part of the world to refuel ships.

“If we’re going to have people out there, if we’re going to have people traveling around doing security assistance work, if we’re going to have forces on the ground training and exercising, if we’re going to have a presence out there day to day, responding to operations, in an environment that’s really hostile and where people are out to get us, and they’re watching our every move looking for an opportunity to hurt us, we’re going to have times when our people are going to get hurt.”

The senators walked out of that meeting satisfied with what I’d said; and it all ended there.

Later, to Tommy Franks’s credit, he stepped up to the plate and said, “I agree with General Zinni’s decision. I would have made the same one. It made military sense.”

The CENTCOM experience taught me a lot about the world and the role of our great nation in it. We could make a difference if we were committed to stand up to our obligations, not only as the last remaining superpower, but also as the last beacon of hope for many people on this planet.

Forty years as a Marine taught me that the only place to be is in the center of the arena. You get knocked down out there and you make mistakes. But you also realize that it sure beats sitting in the grandstands criticizing those who have the guts to be out there. And every once in a while you can make a difference.

I adjusted, with some difficulty, to civilian life and retirement after four decades of service. I missed the Corps and the arena that gave me a tremendous sense of fulfillment. Little did I realize that another form of service awaited me.