Book: The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America`s Military

Author: Dana Priest
Publisher:

Dana Priest’s new book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military, is the hottest cake in the market and the political circles. The book is published by W.W. Norton & Company and is dated February 24, 2003. The first time I came across a reference to this book was in Maureen Dowd’s column, What Would Genghis Do? (The New York Times, Editorial/Op-Ed, March 5, 2003). Dowd wrote in her column, “During the innocent summer before 9/11, the defense secretary’s office sponsored a study of ancient empires – Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols – to figure out how they maintained dominance…. In her new book, The Mission, about America’s growing dependence on the Military to manage world affairs, Dana Priest says that the Pentagon commissioned the study at a time when Rummy (Donald Rumsfeld) did not have designs on the world.” I was intrigued.

The book provides a rare insight into the strategies of military operations conducted worldwide by the U.S. army. The whole world is divided into five regional commands each with its own regional Commander in Chief (CinC pronounced as sink). Five regions are comprised of Pacific, Northern, European, Southern, and Central.

The regions are fairly well defined geographically although their boundaries might be adjusted from time to time with the changing circumstances. According to Priest, “Like the European colonialists who divided up Asia and Africa, the Defense Department draws and redraws the CinCdoms every two years as part of its biannual review of the United Command Plan.” Each CinC has tremendous authority for operations and making crucial decisions. Speaking of (Anthony) Zinny, the CinC of the Central region before the current CinC, Gen. Tommy Frank, Priest describes in her book, “In Bahrain, where he (Zinni) was to attend a regional conference, he was welcomed like a royal by hundreds of Persian Gulf officers and sheiks, and by the seventy U.S. and civilian defense officials in attendance. Security was tight at the conference, the topic of which was an attack early-warning system for the region: even the American ambassadors invited had trouble angling their way through the robed, armed guards positioned around Zinni’s armored BMW. Officially, Zinni was outranked at the meeting by the six American ambassadors to the Persian Gulf countries. But in any motorcade, the CinC rode in the lead car. Ambassadors wandered the hotel lobby, alone and unnoticed, and slept in regular-sized rooms. The CinC’s team occupied an entire hotel wing. He stayed in a suite the size of a house, patrolled by half a dozen visible security agents and a dozen unnoticeable ones.” At another place in the book, Priest describes, “The Pentagon gives each regional CinC a long-distance aircraft and a fleet of helicopters for short flights. In-flight refuelers are available for very long trips. Some CinC’s travel with an entourage of up to thirty-five officers and senior non-commissioned officers. By contrast, the secretary of state is the only U.S. diplomat with a dedicated aircraft and security entourage. All other diplomats must fly scheduled commercial airlines or hitch rides on military planes.”

A CinC can indeed be very bold and gutsy in his performance of the mission. During Bill Clinton’s presidency when Iraq had expelled the UN weapon inspectors in 1998, Priest says in her book, “The White House needed a confrontation to show Capitol Hill and the ever-critical United Nations that the remaining shred of their Iraq policy still mattered, now that Iraq had kicked out the UN weapon inspectors. Zinni received early word that the White House planned to ask him to order pilots to draw Iraqi fire. The U.S. pilots, of course, would have to respond. If they want me to start a war, I can do that, Zinni told his closest aides. But this game-playing, as he saw it, was militarily unsound….. Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon`s usual representatives at high-powered meetings of the cabinet secretaries’ deputies, conveyed the White House’s formal request. They want you to do this, Ralston told Zinni. Well, if someone wants me to do this, Zinni replied sternly, you can send me an order. No one would push it that far, Zinni knew: the White House desire to be more provocative was dead.” Zinni summed up his role as CinC in that “he had become a modern-day proconsul, descendent of the
Warrior-statesman who ruled the Roman Empire’s outlying territory, bringing orders and ideals from a legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustine – they would have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not.”

The book has received rave reviews. According to Richard Holbrooke, “Few Americans realize how deeply the military is now involved in American foreign policy. Dana Priest’s revealing, close-up look at this dramatic new development is especially timely as we view the challenges of the post-9/11 world.” According to Jody Williams, Nobel Laureate for Peace (1997), “The Mission asks hard questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy and gaps in civilian leadership in the non-military branches of the government that have resulted in their failure to use the historic preeminence of the U.S. to lead the world to a more stable peace. This book should be required reading in schools and universities across the United States.”

Dana Priest is an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post. She has worked with the Post for fourteen years on different assignments including an assistant foreign editor. She has a BA in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2001, she received the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the national defense for her series “The Proconsuls”.