General Hayden: Iraq is Gone

On Wednesday, the former Director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency Ret. Gen. Michael Hayden told NewsMax TV host Steve Malzberg, “Iraq as we know it is gone.”

In pinning the blame squarely on President Barack Obama, Hayden said the president reminded him of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick uttering the famous line in Casablanca “I was misinformed.”

Hayden also emphasized the lack of a good option and joked it’s time to “get in the way back machine, go back three years and undo some incredibly unwise decisions that we made then and I really do think thats the nub of the issue.”  

The general discussed current options saying we have to “limit our objectives,” ignore the “artificial borders drawn by Europeans” and let Iraq devolve into three separate countries. Hayden said Iraq is gone and it “certainly is not going to be reconstituted” adding the result will be the three separate states of Shiastan, Sunnistan and Kurdistan.

Hayden pointed out this would create a powerful ally with the American-friendly Kurds, who essentially already have a functioning state. The three state solution would also allow the United States to isolate the ISIS-controlled Sunnistan as a terrorist safe heaven to target.

In 2006, then then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) argued for a similar partition solution with three Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab regions. However, Biden wanted to keep central government in charge of common interests. 

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