Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a potential running mate for presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, declared that “the Islamic world is an epic failure” and alleged that his bluntness about the threat of terrorism cost him his job in the Obama administration.
“We have failed to challenge their jihadist doctrines, even though their true believers only number a small fraction of the Muslim world, and even though everybody, above all most living Muslims, knows that the Islamic world is an epic failure, desperately needing economic, cultural and educational reform of the sort that has led to the superiority of the West,” Flynn wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post.
That op-ed comes as the Trump campaign is floating Flynn, who has been advising the real estate mogul on foreign policy issues, as a potential vice presidential candidate this fall. Flynn used the article, titled, “The military fired me for calling our enemies radical jihadis,” to explain why his career came to an abrupt end in 2014.
“I was pissed but knew that I had maintained my integrity and was determined in the few months I had left to continue the changes I was instituting and to keep beating the drum about the vicious enemy we were facing (still are),” Flynn wrote. “It infuriates me when our president bans criticism of our enemies, and I am certain that we cannot win this war unless we are free to call our enemies by their proper names: radical jihadis, failed tyrants, and so forth.”
Flynn, who led the Joint Special Operations Command before taking over as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, lamented that “the bureaucracy” could fire him in wartime. “At the time, I was working very hard to change the culture of DIA from one overly focused on Washington, D.C., to a culture that focused on our forward-based war fighters and commanders,” he wrote. “It was not an easy shift, but it was necessary and exactly the reason I was put into the job in the first place.”
If Flynn is chosen to run for vice president, the reasons for his ouster and his actions since then will certainly come under scrutiny. John Schindler, a former National Security Agency official whose writing about the classification issues pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal have established him as a respected foreign policy commentator on the right, has been sharply critical of Flynn.
“Mike Flynn was a good [military intelligence] officer,” Schindler tweeted. “A fine JSOC J2. Got promoted to a level he couldn’t handle, crashed+burned. Now he’s cozy w/the Kremlin.”
Flynn has been advocating for the United States to coordinate with Russia in fights against terrorism, a proposal at odds with the Obama administration and many European governments in light of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine. But Trump has made similar suggestions.
