The United States must learn from the wars that happened after the 9/11 attacks, including that there must be an "exit strategy" in mind when it enters into combat following such incidents and that we must stay away from nation-building efforts in other parts of the world, retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Blaine Holt, the co-founder of Restore Liberty and a Newsmax contributor, said Sunday.
"I don't want to get into the hindsight is 20-20 place or try to second-guess our leaders at the time," Holt commented on Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend." "That's not my intent, but what I would say is we had several strategies out in front of us that we could have used…but what we embarked on was the very thing that President [George W.] Bush said when he was running for office that he would not do, which was nation building."
Holt on Friday published an opinion piece for Newsmax on the subject, commenting that he had thought at the time that "we would wage a fierce campaign, globally and do so strategically (unpredictably), utilizing our immense intelligence capabilities, while husbanding our resources."
"We did not owe a nation-building exercise to anyone," he wrote.
"We learned many lessons from Vietnam about this, with counterinsurgency going wrong in so-called hearts and minds campaigns," Holt said Sunday. "My point is that we should learn from Afghanistan that when we enter into combat, and there is no doubt that we needed to go to Afghanistan to answer for this, we have to have an exit strategy in mind. We have to have a victory strategy about how our wars end because we owe that to the American people who send their sons and daughters to serve in uniform."
Further, he said it is up to the appropriate authorities to "go back and trace all the contracts, all the money, the decisions and why they were made …we have so many unanswered questions."
The United States should "never walk away from the goodness that is American" and try to seek a better way both here and in other countries, Holt said, but still, "we have to go back and look at our strategic choices for those that we have elected and those that serve in our names, and we have to hold them to account if they have done things that have pulled this nation into endless war, endless expense and blood where it didn't need to be shed."
The retired general further said he doesn't think Americans have forgotten 9/11 but, "we need to have leaders that need to help, not forget, and we need to have leaders who don't disassociate the population from a war that it's actively engaged in."
"I remember some of the legislation five years ago that wanted to take away college benefits from GIs who were serving in a hot combat zone," he added. "That's a leadership issue. That's not a population issue, and I found nothing but citizens who have welcomed us back and said thank you for your service, and they meant it with all their hearts."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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