That and he's a moron.
Nailed it. H5.
AQI was an incredibly bloodthirsty gang of murderous scum who gloried in blowing up civilians and beheading any Iraqi police or military who fell into their hands, and they went to great lengths to kidnap them in groups to do just that. The only way to deal with them is to kill them.
On a related note, I noticed today that Clayton whatsisname on Fox & Friends apparently does not understand that 'Existential threat' has nothing to do with the philosophy of Existentialism, but rather means a thing that constitutes a threat to one's very existence. To be fair, it was also apparent in their tape of the Susan Rice speech that gave rise to his blunder, that Susan Rice doesn't actually understand that such threats start small, weak, and easily quashed, but if left alone can quickly blossom into huge intractable problems requiring maximum efforts over many years to address. For instance, in 1934, Adolf Hitler was a strutting little pretender, yanking a lion's tail to see if he could get away with it, and ready to scramble back into his mousehole if confronted...but in fact, he wasn't confronted, and instead his power rapidly multiplied and by 1939, just five years later, he WAS an existential threat (At least to England and France; there is a supportable argument that the only true 'Existential threats' the US has ever faced were the British, the Confederacy, and the Soviet Union, no matter how badly Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan needed to be crushed from a moral or strategic point of view).
