Lakhota
Diamond Member
"We strategically marched in the wrong direction."
Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former U.S. special forces chief in Iraq and Afghanistan who was the country's highest ranking military intelligence official, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.
"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.
"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision."
When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."
Read the entire interview here.
Former Military Chief: Iraq War Was A 'Failure' That Helped Create ISIS
Ex-US Intelligence Chief on Islamic State's Rise: 'We Were Too Dumb' - SPIEGEL ONLINE
That fits with what many of us already know - and accept as fact.