Huffington Post -- Jessica Schulberg
WASHINGTON -- Retired Gen. John Allen, the U.S. government's point person for the international fight against the Islamic State, publicly admitted on Thursday what most Americans have long suspected about the United States' newest military conflict. Eight months after the initial bombing campaign began in Iraq, Allen told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there is no exit plan for what increasingly seems to be an intractable conflict.
During a Thursday morning hearing, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) asked Allen, who in September was appointed as the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, to describe the exit strategy for an eventual conclusion to the war.
Allen responded, “The exit strategy is an Iraq that is territorially secure, sovereign."
"An ISIL that has been denied safe haven, ultimately has been disrupted to the point where it has no capacity to threaten at an existential level the government of Iraq and the nation of the Iraqi people -- and ultimately ends up in a state that does not permit it to threaten the United States or our homeland,” the general said, using the Obama administration’s preferred name for the Islamic State.
“General Allen, that doesn’t sound like a strategy to me, that sounds like a wish list,” Grayson countered.
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