When dealing with the Deep State, never call retreat. you may be taken up into the meat grinder, but that is just part of the collateral damage, throwing yourself into the breach, that another may rise in your wake and carry the fight back to the declared foe.
Do not consider this to be “losing”. What is not a win, is a learning experience, harsh though it may be. Retreat, if not for purely strategic purposes, almost certainly results in losing, particularly when it is permitted to become a rout. Fleeing armies are no longer armies, they are blinded buffalo on a stampede, and those rarely end well.
Ping
Lesson #1 — Don't conduct sensitive diplomatic phone calls on your personal mobile phone while you are on vacation in a third world dump.
Lesson #2 — Don't plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit.
If Flynn didn’t include these two among his lessons to be learned, then I wouldn’t waste my time reading anything else he has to say.