In fact, over and over during the '90s, the generals with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong--and the civilians without it guessed it right--about what would happen when the United States went to war. Before the Gulf war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell--who had spent his life in uniform--said war with Iraq would prove too costly. He was overridden by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who once infamously told a reporter that he "had other priorities in the '60s than military service." In 1992 Powell wrote a New York Times op-ed warning against U.S. military intervention in Bosnia--intervention that (in tandem with a Croat ground assault) eventually forced the Serbs into a peace deal. And in 1999 the Joint Chiefs of Staff leaked to the press their opposition to U.S. war in Kosovo--a war that drove Slobodan Milosevic from Kosovo without a single American combat casualty.
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