Wednesday Fox News Channel’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto” President Barack Obama’s former Defense Intelligence Agency director U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said ISIS is winning because Obama “squandered an enormous opportunity” that then-commander of Multi-National Force in Iraq U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus and the military had won by 2011 in Iraq.
Flynn said, “We have to step back and take a look at really what is it we’re trying to accomplish in the Middle East. This trickle effect of sort of strategic drips, if you will, just doesn’t appear to be working, and as I said earlier in some testimony I made today, I was a bit surprised that the president’s statements, you know, and waiting on the Pentagon for a plan. That is not where it should begin. Where it needs to begin is—it needs to begin at the White House. The White House needs to state a clear policy, strategic policy, that has a long term framework that can get us to a place where we can at least create conditions for stability. I think that this addition of more troops out into the Middle East is just—it is sort of a drip effect of strategy rather than actually having a long clear policy objective we need to achieve.”
“What we achieved under General Petraeus up through 2011, and defeating this threat that we faced out there, I mean, once we decided to come out of there, we squandered an enormous opportunity that frankly the military did actually provide our nation and the Middle East,” he added. “And what has happened is a void was created and that void has amounted to what it is that we’re facing right now. One of the phrases we used in the military is bad news doesn’t get better with time. I will tell you, there has been a lot of bad news over the last couple of years.”
When asked, “Do you think ISIS is winning?” Flynn answered, “Yes, I think ISIS is achieving the objectives they have set out to achieve. I think they feel probably very emboldened, they feel pretty good. Their resiliency is extraordinary. But I will tell you, Neil, we have seen this resiliency in fighting the Taliban, fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, fighting other groups of these al Qaeda and associated movements over the last decade plus. So these guys are very resilient. They’re achieving their objectives. As you talked a little bit about a few minutes back, if you look at a map of the region and see what they’re dominating, the Middle East, a new Middle East is struggling to be born here, and if we’re not part of that growth, if the United States doesn’t take a driver’s seat in that, it is going to turn into something that is going to deeply affect our national security for a long time.”
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