Michael Flynn didn’t disclose much that many Americans already didn’t believe or even know.
The retired Army lieutenant general — who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency — told a German newspaper that the Iraq War was a big mistake and that the Bush administration started it on “sketchy evidence” that Iraq had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
History, Gen. Flynn said, won’t be kind as the Iraq War legacy is written over time.
Gosh. Do you think?
I guess my question for the general might be: Why didn’t you tell us before now?
Flynn told Der Spiegel, “When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them.'”
I don’t think the emotional part of the response should be criticized. We were angry as hell at what happened. that day.
But to assign complicity for the 9/11 attack almost immediately to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after going after the Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan is where the policy came apart rapidly.
Flynn believes that eliminating Saddam Hussein helped strengthen and embolden the Islamic State, the Sunni terrorist organization that has risen to become a fearsome force in the Middle East. He lays responsibility for that squarely on the Bush administration.
Flynn, though, doesn’t spare Barack Obama from blame in this conflict. According to the Huffington Post: “In a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera’s ‘Head to Head,’ Flynn took aim at Obama’s publicly stated goals to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ the Islamic State, saying that while the administration is effectively degrading the organization, the group cannot be ‘destroyed,'”
He added: “We may cause it to change its name, but we are never going to destroy this organization,” Flynn said. “Destroy means to completely eliminate — he should not have used those words, those were incorrect words to use and he should have been more precise.”
So … the debate goes on.