Mucho que Decir guest: “We rushed into a war for no reason”
Luis Quiñonez: “If we get into a guerrilla war, like what happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, that’s where the problem will come in. We’ll be stuck there for another 20 years.”
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From the March 26, 2026, edition of La Nueva Poderosa's Mucho que Decir
LUIS QUIÑONEZ [POLITICAL STRATEGIST]: What they want, what they’re waiting for, is for us to send in ground troops to attack and try to take over the country, so they’ll retreat to the mountains, and people will go into hiding. Just like what happened in Afghanistan, and you saw how that turned out for us. It didn’t go all that well for us because the problem is that in Iraq, we did manage to bring things under control, since a lot of people were fed up.
That’s why we rushed into a war for no reason, without having figured out how we were going to get out of that war, what kind of off-ramps we had prepared, or who the leaders were going to be. We went in blindly, and that’s costing us. If we’d already identified the people who were going to take over, as happened in Iraq, even though Iraq still rose again and caused us problems, but thank God we managed to regain control after we returned to Fallujah. And we sent in the search, that famous one where we sent 20,000 troops to pacify them, and they finally succeeded.
That’s what they’re aiming for right now. They’re waiting for us to go in on the ground, because they’re not going to face us head-on, army against army. And this is going to be another Vietnam, where people eventually get tired of it. They’re with the Houthis, who are also going to start launching attacks elsewhere to keep the flow of oil slow or stopped, if possible.
That’s where we have to be extremely careful, because people are already upset. Prices have skyrocketed, they’re going to keep rising, and if we don’t stop this war, they’ll keep skyrocketing even more. And if we get into a guerrilla war, like what happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, that’s where the problem will come in. We’ll be stuck there for another 20 years, and, as he said, we didn’t want to get involved in another one of these stupid, endless wars, because in the end we all lose, and that’s true. That’s where we need to pay attention, so it doesn’t turn into another Afghanistan or another Vietnam.