One Last Thing About Zinni (For Now)
As kind of a coda to the non-ambassador-to-Iraq-Tony-Zinni episode, I speculated at first about the optics of placing two generals -- Zinni and Karl Eikenberry
Jul 31, 202037.1K Shares1.1M Views
As kind of a coda to the non-ambassador-to-Iraq-Tony-Zinni episode, I speculated at first about the optics of placing two generals— Zinni and Karl Eikenberry — in the all-important ambassadorships of Iraq and Afghanistan. Laura Rozen got at that in her Zinni post as well, and now a friend, stationed abroad in the Foreign Service, emails:
“„It’s a difficult issue, but really, having two (former) generals in charge of the two big diplomatic theaters pulls the rug out from [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates’ insistence that the State Department needs to empower diplomats.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily explain/excuse the way Zinni was evidently treated, but still. It’s facile and, frankly, ignorant to say that military officers don’t understand diplomacy or are more likely to militarize a problem. In fact, as far as Afghanistan and Iraq are concerned, I’d say they’re lesslikely to militarize an issue, since nearly every soldier or marine who has ever served in either war will tell you eagerly that the civilian component is what’s lacking in the wars, and they don’t understand how the State Department can’t get its act together for what’s fundamentally a political conflict. (That’s alsosuperficial and reductive, but it has great deal of truth as well.) Not that this will be an issue in Iraq, at least.
Paula M. Graham
Reviewer
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