‘Get Out Before They Get You’: Lieutenant General In Charge Of Iraq Withdrawal Says US Didn’t Prepare For ‘Worst Case Scenario’ In AfghanistanSebastian Hughes
Contributor
September 16, 2021 9:07 PM ET
Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr, who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the failure to prepare for the “worst case scenario” caused the withdrawal from Afghanistan to be far more chaotic.
“We were down to the individual name and I think, as far as I know, we had left just one person in a jail and that person I got word had gotten successfully freed,” Spoehr described Iraq evacuation efforts.
“No one wanted to mess with the U.S. on their way out because they were going to get hammered,” Spoehr said.
The Biden administration’s failure to prepare for the “worst case scenario” led to the chaotic final days of the war in Afghanistan, the former deputy commanding general who oversaw the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“You plan for the worst case and the worst case would never be to evacuate people out of Hamid Karzai airport,” former Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, current director of Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told the DCNF. “You would take … your base most able to be protected and evacuate from there.”
Spoehr described the Iraq withdrawal, which had a deadline of Dec. 31, 2011, as “heavily scripted, heavily planned,” and “orderly.” He said the Afghanistan withdrawal, on the other hand, was a “kind of Helter Skelter, get out before they get you kind of thing.”
The U.S. also had “a lot of combat power” in Iraq at the end of the withdrawal, Spoehr said. “I call it like a porcupine … no one wanted to mess with the U.S. on their way out because they were going to get hammered.”
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https://dailycaller.com/2021/09/16/lieutenant-general-iraq-withdrawal-worst-case-scenario-afghanistan/
