Saturday, December 05, 2015

ISIS, From the Horse's Mouth

It's a powerful an indictment of Tony Blair, George w. Bush and Dick Cheney: without their war of choice against Iraq, there would be no ISIS today.

In November, Der Spiegel published an interview with former US with former Defense Intelligence Agency director, General Michael Flynn, in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. Some of his remarks are chilling in the context of the recent massacre in San Bernardino.



On ISIS leader, Abu Bakh al-Baghdadi:








Flynn: ... yes, absolutely ...

SPIEGEL ONLINE: ... the Iraq war?



Dana said...

Learning lessons requires being able to admit, even to oneself, that uncertainty exists.

The current western leadership is unwilling and/or unable to entertain uncertainty.

Anonymous said...

"Tony Blair, George w. Bush and Dick Cheney"... One need to add few other names such as Rumsfeld, Pearle and Wolfowitz. Few other architects of the deception would also qualify...

Owen Gray said...

We are the authors of our own misery.

theo said...

To take exception with the good General Flynn, Iraq most definitely and Afghanistan possibly, were not about getting the “bad guys’. Iraq was was a war of resource conquest and Afghanistan could be argued the same way. The money line I remember from some US staffer was “Pipelines or Bombs. Take your pick’”. Both wars could be argued as wars of acquisition but Iraq there is no doubt. 9/11 was the excuse and for some people a huge amount of money was made at the expense of the blood of the military and the wealth of America.

For the General to argue mistakes were made implies the US military high command are dumber than a sack of hammers. They were entirely complicit in the war and they knew beforehand what the likely outcomes would be. They just didn’t care. Much like our own Air Force High Staff who think the F-35 is a good replacement for the F-18.

I could go on but it ruins the taste of my wine.

Anonymous said...

@# Blair, Bush and Cheney.
I find it difficult to sympathise with our western governments and their populous whilst the instigators of this 100 year war remain at large.
If we do not own up to our mistakes then we are going to repeat them.

The Mound of Sound said...

@ Dana. I'm just revisiting Raulston Saul's "The End of Globalism." It's a far better read the second time around. One of the points he makes is that, in the age of globalism, political leadership has both surrendered national sovereignty to multinational corporations but, in the process, has also abandoned a lot of the responsibility once expected of political leaders.

We have, going back as far as Martin's decision to send Canadian forces into combat in Kandahar, effectively outsourced our defence and the associated elements of our foreign policy to Washington.

Just look at how readily Canada enlisted in America's Aerial Foreign Legion, always ready to send penny packets of CF-18s wherever it seemed politically advantageous to join the herd.

Remember when Harper staged his "Mission Accomplished" CF-18 flypast over Parliament Hill to celebrate our grand victory in Libya?

The Mound of Sound said...

@ Owen, that pretty much nails it. How else would we get dragged into these conflicts we have no prospect of winning?

The Mound of Sound said...

@ Theo - well put. I'm convinced that, when it comes to these failed foreign adventures, we're afflicted with incompetent leadership, military and political.

Hillier has never accounted for his scheme to drive the Talibs out of Kandahar province with a paltry total force of just 2,500 personnel, a fraction of which were combat troops. Hillier claimed the insurgents numbered just "a few dozen." I remember that coming out of his mouth when he was ringed by reporters after winning the go-ahead from Martin. Yet, in the following years, when it became apparent Hillier's few dozen were actually several thousand, our force numbers remained static - 2,500.

When the counterinsurgents, us, cannot dominate their territory, the only outcome can be failure. Defeat is the unspoken reality of withdrawal leaving the insurgents holding the field.