Interview with Trump advisor Gen. Michael Flynn

[Chiram]

“The arab world has to overcome the political ideology it calls islam.”

Interview translated from Le Monde

Michael Flynn, 58, was one of the top advisers to President-Elect Trump during his campaign.

The retired General, who directed military intelligence from 2012 to 2014, was listed as a possible Secretary of Defense, CIA Director or National Security Advisor. He was interviewed on May 26th in Washington DC by French journalist Antoine Viktine during the filming of a documentary: Bashar, Chaos & I, soon to be released on France 3.

AV: You oversaw military intelligence in 2012 before resigning in 2014 – what was your disagreement with Obama.

MF: In Syria, we saw very early that foreign jihadists were pouring into the country. I spent a decade fighting those people, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Est Africa, North Africa… No one wanted to pay attention. The Obama administration chose to ignore my warnings, which didn’t align with their narrative. We were in an electoral year: Bin Laden was dead, Al Qaida defeated…

AV: Isn’t Syrian President Bashar Al -Assad responsible for the current situation? He abstained from fighting the islamic state organization (IS) and released jihadists from prison…

MF: Assad is a brutal dictator. He used chemical weapons against his own population. He committed all possible mistakes. In 2011, instead of accepting reforms, he crushed demonstrations and triggered a civil war. On the other side, the insurgents were clever, equipped with military knowhow and financial resources. When Assad made mistakes, they took advantage and all the radicals started to flow in by the thousands each month.

A new Middle-East was born in the past few years. There will be new borders and always more wars. It will continue to impact Europe. We should face these problems collectively. Arab leaders must be responsible. They can’t continue to put their heads in the sand and say it doesn’t concern them, and rejoice that jihadists are going to Europe instead of staying at home.

We have a major problem that no one wants to recognize because of political correctness: its islam.
That religion is a problem. I’m not speaking of the whole muslim world, but of islam.
The arab world must overcome the political ideology it calls islam.

AV: You mean islamism?

MF: Yes, islamism. Study Mohammed! We understand how all this started. During this century, it must be defeated, it will take time, decades perhaps. Otherwise, there will be perpetual conflicts.

AV: After the chemical attack in 2013, Mr. Obama did not intervene against Assad…

MF: It was a terrible decision. His first mistake was announcing that we had a “red line” (the use of chemical weapons, declared by Mr. Obama in 2012). It exposes us to being tested. The decision not to intervene was an error, we lost a lot of credibility in the Middle-East and everywhere.

AV: Would an intervention have led to regime change in Damascus?

MF: Yes, our intervention would have been devastating to the Syrian regime. It would have sent a clear message to all dictators tempted to violate international law. We never should have let Assad get away with it. But the real question is: what do you do after? We must go back to the arrival of Western forces in the Middle-East in 2001 (Afghanistan) and 2003 (Iraq). Dramatic mistakes were made. We were incapable of understanding the people we came to help. We wanted to impose our values, way of live, we tried nation-building instead of just fighting the enemy and allowing populations to choose the state of their choice.

AV: After explaining that it was a mistake to help the Syrian rebels, you criticized Obama for his will not to change the regime in Syria. Is that not contradictory?

MF: We should have asked the question before going into Afghanistan, Iraq and or Libya, before those countries became disasters. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to topple brutal dictators that abuse their populations and groups like IS.

AV: Is the coalition’s war against IS effective?

MF: It is under-dimensioned. If you’re not sure to win, don’t go! The USA, France, all states invest in conflicts. We are good at that game: buy more weapons, give more out, drop more bombs. But, in the Middle-East the problems are not due to war, but to defective governments, bad educational systems, and an economy solely based on one resource: oil. We must invest in stability, not in war. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be war. But the fire could have been put out in 2011.

AV: Would you say that the US should be more realistic and play the card of stable regimes even if they are dictatorial?

MF: Absolutely. We should start by understanding governments and peoples and pressure their leaders. Saddam Hussein was brutal. We should have told him: if you want to become respectable, and come to the UN, you must do certain things. We aren’t asking you to become democratic, but you must at least accept certain norms and values. The same is true with Iran, a country that is a major problem. These pressures must be applied through tough diplomacy, not the politically correct diplomacy that consists of shaking hands. If these people don’t understand, there are other ways to pressure them, economically for instance. But it must be done before time is too late.

AV: Aren’t Western leaders, under pressure from popular opinion, being pushed to act when confronted with humanitarian crises, like in Libya?

MF: I studied the Algerian War. The lesson I learned is that it is difficult to impose oneself on a hostile local population. Victory in war is not decided by the top brass but by populations.

AV: What diplomacy is adapted to such troubled times?

MF: Look at China, it invests in stability, while we spend our money in the Middle-East.

AV: The Chinese don’t want to change the world.

MF: Yes, but at their own pace.

AV: Sometimes interventionalist, at times isolationist, Trump does not seem to have a clear policy…

MF: As in war he attacks his adversaries’ weaknesses. Those who know him, know he has a strategic vision for the world, in a way that we, the United States, can play a stronger role to make the world safer, rather than all these follies in which we’ve become engaged.

http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2016/11/15/ne-pas-intervenir-en-syrie-en-2013-a-ete-une-erreur-selon-un-conseiller-de-donald-trump_5031547_829254.html

[Kahane-Was-Right BT]

Flynn sounds like a great guy and this interview is exhibit A why the Obama team (by team I mean Obama, all his appointees and staff and the media who operate as his surrogates) will do everything in their power to keep Flynn away from the WH or a role of significant power.