Colonel Bing West, a former Marine combat Commander and a self-admitted old grunt, said that we had the war won in Iraq, but President Obama pulled our troops out and betrayed the Sunnis.
In an interview on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot Radio with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, West explained that the Sunnis had come over to our side in 2006. They had developed a respect for Americans and recognized that “Americans are the strongest tribe.” West explained that the Sunnis had come to a point where they concluded, “We can rely upon you.” However, the author of The Strongest Tribe asserted that “When we pulled out of Iraq under President Obama, and we should not of done it, then we betrayed the Sunnis.”
In what Bannon referred to as a realistic viewpoint, West said that “Now we are stuck. The Sunnis don’t trust us, and Iraq will never come back again.”
West, who has written eight books on national security, said that Iraq is basically divided into three states: to the east is the Kurds; from Baghdad going south to the Persian Gulf are the Shiites, whom he writes off as a partition of Iran; and the third part is the Sunni extremists in northern Iraq and Syria.
The extremists in the north are the problem. “We are going to have to destroy them,” he said. “If we don’t, with their view of the world, they’re going to destroy us.”
Obama knows from his advisors that Islamic State is a severe threat, but West maintains that Obama has painted himself into a corner. The colonels insists that “because Obama has gone on record saying, ‘You know I’ve won the war in Iraq,’ he now has to publicly admit that that isn’t true. He is having a very difficult time acknowledging that.”
Strategically, Colonel West still believes that we can prevent the IS jihadists from moving in the open with our pinpoint air weaponry technology. But, to get the terrorists “off the ground, we need the Sunni tribes to do that, along with the help of our special forces and CIA,” he said.
Bannon lamented that all the accomplishments gained by the American military in Iraq are lost. It was “fought with the blood of American soldiers. A feckless commander in chief essentially walked away from it, and we left ourselves in a horrific situation.”
The Breitbart Executive Chairman added that “And for the people in this country who do not think it is going to blow back on England and France and the United States and the Judeo Christian West, they got another thing coming to them. This is as serious a threat as this country has ever faced. We are going to have to depend on our young men and women again to go over there and clean this thing up.”
The Colonel replied, “you said it better than I could. This sucks.”
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