{"id":60971,"date":"2015-07-22T09:07:46","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T13:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=60971"},"modified":"2015-07-22T09:07:46","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T13:07:46","slug":"odierno-frustrating-to-watch-isis-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=60971","title":{"rendered":"Odierno: “frustrating” to watch ISIS in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno, did a final interview with Fox News<\/a> as he heads out the door into retirement. During that interview, he candidly told Jennifer Griffin that he is frustrated that conditions in Iraq are what they’ve become and that it was completely preventable;<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s frustrating to watch it,\u201d Odierno said. \u201cI go back to the work we did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 and we got it to a place that was really good. Violence was low, the economy was growing, politics looked like it was heading in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odierno said the fall of large parts of Iraq was not inevitable, reiterating concerns about the pace of the U.S. troop withdrawal there.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we had stayed a little more engaged, I think maybe it might have been prevented,\u201d he said. \u201cI’ve always believed the United States played the role of honest broker between all the groups and when we pulled ourselves out, we lost that role.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I applaud the General for speaking up now, but he does a great disservice to troops currently engaged in combat operations in Iraq by waiting six years to bring up his concerns. He continues that he had no access to policymakers in the White House, but that he relayed his concerns to the secretary of defense. Yeah, well, we’re talking about him communicating through Robert Gates and Leon Panetta who also waited to criticize the Obama Administration on their handling of the Iraq situation until after they retired. To me, that’s just cowardly. They should have all publicly and vociferously resigned to expose the failures of the policy makers before their policies led us to this point.<\/p>\n

But, then Odierno sent his sergeant major to Afghanistan to lecture the troops that they were causing the “green-on-blue” attacks by their allies because they didn’t respect the culture of Islam. He also presided over the policy that left our troops defenseless while their supposed allies shot them up in those attacks. I understand that his job was to salute and execute, but you know, there comes a point when you have to realize that the orders you’re being given disregard the advice you’re giving and it’s time to go.<\/p>\n

I noticed that Odierno doesn’t mention the massive cuts that are being made to compensation and manpower by this administration, so while he seems to be acting brave in his criticism, he still sticks up for the policies that are destroying the Army.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno, did a final interview with Fox News as … Odierno: “frustrating” to watch ISIS in Iraq<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-big-army"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/60972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}