David Kilcullen is an Australian who has spent the last years working with the Bush administration in its fights against “terror.”
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper wrote this about him in late 2006:
Meet David Kilcullen, a 40-year-old former Australian infantry commander who likes nothing more than getting dirt on his boots as he switches between the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US Department of State in Washington. Embarrassed by the attention, Kilcullen told The Australian that he is just one member in a small team, led by Hank Crumpton, the state department’s counter-terrorism chief, blazing a new trail in the war on terror. That team appears to have a deceptively simple message for the Bush administration: there is no substitute for knowing your enemy.
Just another typical Murdoch profile of a person helping us save Western civlisation.
What the paper didn’t include in its profile is his real view about the Iraq war. This is what he said recently:
More bluntly, Kilcullen, who helped Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, called the decision to invade Iraq “stupid” — in fact, he said “f*cking stupid” — and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual’s lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future.
“The biggest stupid idea,” Kilcullen said, “was to invade Iraq in the first place.”