General Zinni’s Warriors + America’s World Service Corps = World Stability

General Zinni’s Warriors + America’s World Service Corps = World Stability
Zinni’s Battle Plan for Peace outlines need for America’s World Service Corps
Dwayne Hunn

“We have a choice. We can do all we can to create stability and order in the world. Or we can do nothing, hunker down, and gamble that the instability and chaos out there will not migrate over here – knowing that steel and electronic barricades will never seal our borders.”

General Zinni’s words took me back to a youthful visit to Saigon during the Vietnam War that showed me its most thriving industry was prostitution. And that its alleys were where Vietnamese would lead you to whatever you wanted, or where they would roll you for your wristwatch, or more.

When I passed my experiences onto a buddy who actually fought in their jungles for two years, he responded, “Well, damn, Saigon was dangerous.”
“What do you mean, you were where it was dangerous. I was just in Saigon.”
“Ahh, no. I never felt in real danger.”
“Huh? You were in the jungle, fighting.”
“Look, whenever we’d see someone in the jungle, my master sergeant would say, ‘Too bad that poor son of a bitch has to die today.’”

Zinni’s foxhole
From his “foxhole view,” General Zinni, in The Battle For Peace, offers a different soldering mindset needed to bring today’s ultimate victory -- stability.

“In 1967 I stepped into an environment radically alien from the Philadelphia where I grew up: Vietnam. My assignment there – as our Marine Corps’s most junior advisor to the elite Vietnamese Marines – launched a decades-long, event filled, mind-opening journey through dozens of no less alien environments.
“When I arrived on Easter morning in March I was a naïve, impressionable, twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant. Infantry officers like me all knew that war is about going out and killing the enemy and winning battles. That’s war. That’s success.
“But my assignment as adviser showed me a very different view of this war – and of all wars. I lived with Vietnamese in the field and in the villages; I spoke Vietnamese; I was immersed in their culture; I hardly saw another American.
“From this perspective I saw that military success on the battlefield alone was not going to give us ultimate victory….”

Peace Corps volunteers come to a similar view, developed from working out of different “foxholes.”

Ultimate victory does not come when “nation building” revolves around employing young men as alley thugs and fifteen to sixty year old women as floor cleaners and hookers.

Most parents, rich or poor, have similar desires. They want their children to be happy, healthy, and big hearted. They love seeing them act kindly. They are proud when good grownups smile at their children’s generosity. And they are hopeful that their elder days will be in the caring hands of loving, well-taught children.

They pray their children won’t scavenge for food, sleep in hutments, cry in refugee tents, or gun down others. They want them sharing a disease free, civil, educated society, living under the rule of fair law, amidst a growing, thinking middle class.

In today’s bush and urban terror wars, winning kill tallies does not build the nations parents desire. From Vietnamese foxholes through posts in the Balkans, Somalia, Iraq, and as Commander in Chief of Central Command, Zinni learned that “victory” revolved around providing what most parents wanted.

While operating out of Vietnam’s Northern II Corps and sharing the village chief’s house, the chief’s elderly wife asked:

“Do you have any pictures of your family in the USA?”
I pulled out what I had – a picture of my wife and me in front of her parents home. The old lady stared at it, shook her head, and then looked up at me with a deeply penetrating expression.
“Why are you here in Vietnam?” she asked me.
I gave her the standard answer about stopping communism and protecting democracy and our Vietnamese allies.
“But what are you going to do to change things there,” she asked, her hand pointing toward the south.
I thought she had made a mistake – the enemy was to the north. Then I realized she was saying exactly what she meant to say. The government that lurched from coup to coup, replacing one general with another, was as much an enemy to her as the Vietcong and the infiltrators from the north.”

To win 21st century wars, does Zinni tread a path different than that of “sanitizing” the jungle?

“If the US conducts a military operation to root out insurgents in some village, what we do to the tribe members who live in the village could alienate them. But if we choose another way to root out the insurgents, we might build confidence in the tribe and bring them over to our side.
“...Any military professional who fails to understand the subtle levels of such dynamics will fail to accomplish the missions our military faces today. Or else he will simply repeat Vietnam: ‘Just kill enough enemies and we win.’ It doesn’t work that way anymore.
“A military unit that gets thrown into Iraq has to understand who are the Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Chaldeans, Turcomans, Syrians; they have to understand tribes and their relationships to their tribes; they have to understand history.
“Our current war in Iraq may be turning into a repetition of Vietnam. The military out there goes from operation to operation; our leaders in Washington assure us we are powering ahead success to success; yet our young nineteen or twenty-year-old soldiers are now asking hard questions: “I can win any battle. But am I winning the war?”

“Walk a mile in my shoes…”
Yes, Zinni walks in villagers sandals, not just military boots. What he advocates fits with Peoples Lobby's citizen-initiated World Service Corps (WSC) proposed congressional legislation. From Kurdistan to the Balkans to Iraq, Zinni knows the ultimate victory comes from winning "hearts and minds" and establishing “stability.”

“In 1991 Operation Provide Comfort (in Kurdistan) ... I was now exposed to political, economic, humanitarian, social international agency, NGO, media issues. Most of these were outside of military experience, doctrine, and training. We learned what we needed to know on the spot.
“As I plunged into Provide Comfort, I found myself involved in day-to-day activities and actions that were not 99 to 100 percent military. Instead of a purely military focus, I was now exposed to political, economic, humanitarian, social international agency, NGO issues, media issues. Most of these were outside of military experience, doctrine, and training. We learned what we needed to know on the spot. P69
“…we had US agencies such as the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), such as Oxfam, CARE and Doctors without Borders, and a coalition of 13 nations sent military forces.
“…And the crisis we expected to handle immediately soon took on a bewildering array of dimensions requiring actions it would require take us months -- even years – to accomplish. We left behind a temporary solution of no-fly zones and security areas that remained in place for twelve years.” P71

Drawn from life’s lessons, Zinni envisions the world’s needs well beyond mere military boots and muscle. He sees a “need (for) a counterpart organization to deal with the political, economic, informational, social, humanitarian, and other dimensions of the issues we face.”

“”The entire world faces a choice: to put in the time, effort, and wisdom necessary to shape an order everyone can live with (as happened in Germany and Japan after World War II), or, to let nature take its course (as happened after World War I, when a near universal failure to take action allowed the Nazi “order” to emerge out of an unstable Germany).
“The action needed is not some twenty-first-century rebirth of the White Man's Burden. Our job in the developed world is not to command and direct but to help, support, and empower. And there's a big place in this for every variety of actor: governments, regional organizations, international organizations, NGOs, ad hoc international coalitions, single individuals, groups and organizations within nations … anyone who wants to help, who can work with the others, and who can do the job effectively.
“We must think of these actions not as “foreign aid” that tosses billions of dollars down some sinkhole of corruption but as investments in our own security and stability. By helping others--a good in itself--we are also greatly lessening the threats to our own well-being.”

“Helping others” and “lessening the threats to our own well-being” is what Peoples Lobby’s citizen-initiated World Service Corps (WSC) proposed congressional legislation does. The congressional proposals at http://www.WorldServiceCorps.us offer the “stability” building service solutions the general advocates, and the world needs.

If the WSC proposals were enacted in the next Congress, each year for the next seven years approximately 140,000 Americans would voluntarily choose to serve in their choice of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, OxFam, Mercy Corps, State Conservation Corps, etc. By the seventh year one million American World Service Corps members of all ages, or less than .6th of 1% of those aged 20-60+, would annually serve for a year or two at home or abroad. After 20 years, Congress could consider sun setting it.

America’s WSC will build worldwide stability. It will prepare us to better handle the manmade and natural disasters lined up on the horizon.

Yes, our soldiers need the best Kevlar vests even if retailing at $1600, armored humvees at $150,000, and F23s at $153 million each. But if we built hundreds of thousands more Habitat Global Village homes for $600 to $8,000 each, stateside homes for less than $60,000 each, wouldn’t the world be stronger and safer? Wouldn’t we then need fewer vests, bombs, and amputees?

With too many of our dedicated soldiers suffering, terrorists being recruited, refugees scavenging, nations stumbling into instability, isn’t it time for America to:
• Move a large all-star team of Americans off the couch and into the classroom of world needs?
• Develop calluses building their nation, the world’s nations, and their firsthand view of the warming global village?
• Inspire other nations to emulate our robust American World Service Corps (AWSC) with their own World Service Corps?

We wouldn’t have lost so much blood, life, and money in Iraq, Somalia, and other unstable spots had 20+ million Americans, rather than 150,000, done Peace Corpsish work over the past four decades. If we don’t quickly start living Kennedy’s words by implementing the critically needed citizen-initiated World Service Corps congressional legislation, we will lose too many lives, limbs, and dollars in the decades ahead.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

General Zinni is right. Ultimate victory comes in building stability. And Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps first Director, was right.

“If the Pentagon’s map is more urgent, the Peace Corp’s is, perhaps, in the long run the most important. What happens in India, Africa, and South America -- whether the nations where the Peace Corps works succeed or not -- may well determine the balance of peace.”