US war on Iraq was a blunder that created Daesh: Former US military chief
The Daesh Takfiris wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria were created due to the United States' erroneous policies that included the 2003 Iraq War, says a former US military chief.
In an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, 56, former US special forces commander in Iraq and Afghanistan referred to the war as “a huge error.”
"The George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create the self-proclaimed Daesh,” he said.
“As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn noted. "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."
He pointed to the rise of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group and how the blinding emotions of September 11 led the United States in the wrong direction strategically.
"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," he said.
According to the former military chief, instead of determining why the US was attacked by terrorists, the Bush administration was looking at where the terrorists came from and locations to attack.
"Then," Flynn said, "We strategically marched in the wrong direction."
In 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In October 2004, however, a CIA report revealed that Saddam did not have any active WMD program at the time of the invasion.
More than one million Iraqis were killed as a result of the invasion, and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.
The Daesh terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.
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