A candid message about Iraq and the Islamic State

The leading German newspaper Der Spiegel published, in its international online edition, an interview with retired U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn, who was commander of special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2004 to 2007 during the Bush administration.   He later served in the Obama administration as the highest ranking military intelligence official as Director of the National Intelligence Agency.

In an interview, Flynn explains the rise of the Islamic State and how the blinding emotions of 9/11 led the United States in the wrong direction strategically.    Was the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 a mistake?   Gen. Flynn said

"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.'  Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from. Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction. . . .

"It was huge error. As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. 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."

The current leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been captured in 2004;  but the U.S. military commission concluded that he was harmless and cleared him for release.   Asked how such a mistake could happen, Gen. Flynn said:  "We were too dumb. We didn't understand who we had there at that moment."

Gen. Flynn's interview was not primarily about blame and responsibility, however.  His message was the lessons we should learn from our mistakes about how to fight this enemy.    First, we must realize how different the Islamic State is organizationally from Al Qaeda under Osama Bin Laden's and then under Ayman al-Zarqawi.

"There's not some line-and-block chart and a guy at the top like we have in our own systems. That's the mirror imaging that we have to, in many ways, eliminate from our thinking. I can imagine a 30-year-old guy with some training and some discussion who receives the task from the top: "Go forth and do good on behalf of our ideology." And then he picks the targets by himself, organizes his attackers and executes his mission."

Recruiting is much more diverse and includes young men from countries all over the world.   So we should expect more attacks of the sort that just occurred in Paris.   There are also important symbolic differences. 

"Bin Laden and Zawahiri sit in their videos, legs crossed, flag behind them, and they've got an AK-47 in their laps. They are presenting themselves as warriors. Baghdadi brought himself to a mosque in Mosul and spoke from the balcony, like the pope, dressed in appropriate black garb. He stood there as a holy cleric and proclaimed the Islamic caliphate. That was a very, very symbolic act. It elevated the fight from this sort of military, tactical and localized conflict to that of a religious and global war."

As to how we can fight them, Flynn said that killing their leaders is "actually doing them and their movement a favor by making them martyrs." 

"The sad fact is that we have to put troops on the ground. We won't succeed against this enemy with air strikes alone. But a military solution is not the end all, be all. The overall strategy must be to take away Islamic State's territory, then bring security and stability to facilitate the return of the refugees. This won't be possible quickly. First, we need to hunt down and eliminate the complete leadership of IS, break apart their networks, stop their financing operations and stay until a sense of normality has been established. It's certainly not a question of months -- it will take years. . . .

"[W]e would need a coalition military command structure and, on a political level, the United Nations must be involved. The United States could take one sector, Russia as well and the Europeans another one. The Arabs must be involved in that sort of military operation, as well, and must be part of every sector. With this model, you would have opportunities -- Russia, for example, must use its influence on Iran to have Tehran back out of Syria and other proxy efforts in the region. . . . "

Asked if a Western military intervention doesn't run the risk of being seen as a new attempt to invade the region, Flynn replied:

"That's why we need the Arabs as partners, they must be the face of the mission -- but, today, they are neither capable of conducting nor leading this type of operation, only the United States can do this. And we don't want to invade or even own Syria. Our message must be that we want to help and that we will leave once the problems have been solved. The Arab nations must be on our side. And if we catch them financing, if they funnel money to IS, that's when sanctions and other actions have to kick in."

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Finally, someone at the highest levels of military and intelligence at the time has acknowledged that invading Iraq was a mistake.    Gen. Flynn speaks with candor and believable honesty.

I don't like hearing that he thinks we have to be part of the troops on the ground.   But, if it has to be, then someone like him can make that case far better than the neo-con hawks and political opponents of President Obama, whose motives are not to be trusted.

And, if ground troops from the U.S. are to be considered, in my opinion, it must include:  (1) the reinstatement of a military draft;  and (2) paying for the war with a war tax.   We should not fight another big war by sending someone else's sons and daughter to do the fighting and putting the bill on our credit card.

Ralph