A PACIFIST MARINE?

Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, a 35-year veteran of the Marine Corps and former Dubya supporter, said in a Washington Post interview he believed American soldiers were going to pay in Iraq for mistakes made by neoconservatives in the Bush administration.

"The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there," he said. "These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground."

Zinni, as former chief of Central Command and a CIA consultant, was "immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq." He also discredits the vice president's assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

"In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.'"

Don't think Zinni is some sort of peacenik, either. The former Marine commander tells the Post:

"I'm not saying there aren't parts of the world that don't need their ass kicked."