Ashton Carter’s problem was that he broke the cardinal rule of Middle Eastern diplomacy — whenever anything goes bad there, blame it on the Jews.
This gives the world an opportunity to stage anti-Israel protests; liberal news outlets get to excoriate Israel for days at a time; and the U.N. gets to declare an anti-Israel resolution.
In contrast, blaming the Iraqi army makes no one happy.
Ashton Carter now needs to turn his talents to preparing a statement for when Baghdad falls that won’t offend anyone. If he can also manage to include some innuendos suggesting that Jewish ancestry in some of the Iraqi generals might have caused Iraq’s downfall, all the better.
Maybe he assumed that one of the generals would claim that the Randoms demoralized them with sex hormone chewing gum, subliminal porn images, and migrating ducks with surveillance cameras. If they haven’t done that already, they really must be demoralized.