Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, a Vietnam War veteran who was commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command between 1997 and 2000, was one of the senior U.S. military officers who was dubious from the start about the idea of invading Iraq. In this excerpt from Hubris, he talks about the “chicken hawks” in the Bush administration: men who never served in the U.S. military but were eager to take the country to war in Iraq. “I didn’t see anybody in there that I remember from the battlefields in Vietnam or elsewhere,” he says.
Zinni also talks about the “hellacious” casualties of the Iraq war–and whether they were worth it. “The proof is in the pudding,” he says. “How much of a threat was Saddam in the end?”
Read more: Intelligence experts knew that the case for war was faulty. Why didn’t they speak up? Where are the architects of the Iraq war now, a decade later? And what are Iraqis lives like today, after the devastation of the war?
The documentary Hubris, about the selling of the war, will re-air on msnbc, Friday March 22, at 9 p.m.
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