A New Military Voice Condemns U.S. Role in Creating ISIS

When the generals who were there call out the strategy as disastrous, we should listen.

Here's Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn:

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, former U.S. special forces commander in Iraq and Afghanistan who was the country's highest ranking military intelligence official, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.

"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday. 

"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "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."

When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."

This is the powerful consensus building up in the military and think-tank culture at the Capital. And yet bellicose presidential candidates still push to preserve the "military option" that must include "boots on the ground."

Make it stop. But we won't. Hillary might, might slow it down, but she's closer to the clown-car boys on this one. My only hope is that it's a feint toward warmongering for the red meat fans before tacking back to less adventurism in her first term. Even her fans have a right to wonder.

She knows a woman can't be a peacenik and win for president, but how far will she go?

 For many, that's the question.