Iraq II: Excerpt du Jour on the War

The second of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks:

Anthony Zinni, recently retired from the Marine Corps, sat behind Cheney on the stage that dy as the speech was delivered . . . He had been a Bush-Cheney supporter in the 2000 campaign. But as he listened to the vice president in Nashville he nearly fell off of his chair: "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence and never -- not once -- did it say, '[Saddam Hussein] has WMD.' " Since retiring he had retained all his top-secret clearances, he was still consulting with the CIA on Iraq, he had reviewed all the current intelligence -- and he had seen nothing to support Cheney's certitude. "It was never there, never there," he said later. These guys are going to war without the evidence to back them up, he thought to himself that day. His second chilling thought, he recalled, was that they didn't understand what they were getting into.

© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.