On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked former Navy SEAL and Blackwater founder Erik Prince for his take on the “happy talk we’re hearing” about the operation to liberate Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State (ISIS).
“More than just the happy talk, call it the politicization, the political attack on Mosul,” Prince replied. “Yeah, we want to retake Mosul, but it could have been done months ago. But of course, it was done right around the election, big pressure from the administration and Washington on the military to suddenly move now and take it, to have a happy story, a so-called victory prior to the election.”
“Clearly they are not going to conquer Mosul,” he continued. “The immediate reporting, ‘Oh, they’re in this city or they’re on the outskirts’ – there’s a long ways to go to capture the city of Mosul. It’s going to be more like fighting in Stalingrad.”
“There is no plan for almost [a] million of refugees or civilians that are still in and around the city. And there’s really no plan for what you do afterwards,” he said.
Prince talked about the chaotic state of President Obama’s Middle East policy, which has American forces fighting alongside Iranian troops in Iraq, while U.S. Navy warships are dodging Iranian missiles off the coast of Yemen.
“The most bipolar part of American foreign policy is that we have Iranians, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Quds Force officers in uniform, leading elements of the Iraqi army called Popular Mobilization Units, which are all-Shia militias. They’re basically identical to what Hezbollah is in Lebanon–basically, an all-Iranian Shia unit. They may become death squads, which makes any Sunni say, ‘I either have to side with ISIS, or I’m going to be fighting against a Shia death squad that is coming to kill me,’” he said.
“At the same time, we have American special forces, U.S. military personnel trying to guide the Iraqi army, operating side by side with Iranian Rev Guard people. A few hundred miles away, off the coast of Yemen, we have Iranians shooting surface-to-surface anti-ship missiles at U.S. Navy warships patrolling off the coast of Yemen, in international waters. I cannot imagine how we have a foreign policy so screwed up that we have those two things occurring in the same theater simultaneously,” Prince marveled.
He talked about the danger this Iranian presence presents to U.S. troops working around Mosul: “These are the same Rev Guard soldiers that provided all kinds of roadside bombs, especially the really nasty ones called EFPs, Explosive Formed Penetrators, which can punch right through the side of any up-armored Humvee, even the Abrams tanks,” he noted.
“So again, operating with the same troops that, a few years ago, were killing and wounding and maiming thousands of our troops during the effort in Iraq. They can certainly turn on that level of hate again. The whole thing is really messed up,” Prince warned.
“Now, if you really want to be geopolitical on it, there is an ancient treaty, an old treaty from the 1920s – I think 1925 – the Treaty of Lausanne, which basically lays out – and this is after the Ottoman Empire collapsed – that if any of the boundaries of Iraq change, basically all the area that is northern Iraq, Kurdistan, including Mosul, becomes part of Turkey again,” he recalled.
“In the last few weeks, Erdogan, on Turkish public television, is showing maps that reflect Turkey, including all of that territory. So we really have the makings of a massive adjustment of the map where the Turks occupy – I think largely destroy – the Kurds, who have been our only reliable allies in that area, and also taking all of northern Syria, even parts of Bulgaria and parts of Greece. All those territories reflect on the maps being issued by the Turkish government on Turkish television, as if to say, ‘This is what the new Turkey looks like now.’”
“So we have great power, real geopolitical challenges ahead, and we have dunces running our foreign policy,” he declared.
Prince said a missing piece of the puzzle is that we don’t know “what deal Erdogan in Turkey has cut with Putin,” but said that “it’s probably not great.”
“It is certainly to the detriment of the Kurds. They’re going to take all the Kurds’ oil,” he predicted. “We have the makings of a real humanitarian crisis. I mean, the Kurds are the only ones – as ISIS is rolling across all these areas – the Kurds are the only ones that sheltered hundreds of thousands, even millions of Christians, and prevented a Christian genocide.”
“I, as a Catholic, take their life and their ability to practice their faith seriously. I think that’s something we should defend and not let the Turks, trying to be the new Ottoman Empire, to roll over and crush them to the point of genocide. We know that the Turks have it in them because they did it to the Armenians. They could do it again to the Kurds. This is a true mess that the next administration is going to inherit, and it will be dangerous waters ahead,” Prince predicted.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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