One of the most damning aspects of how city of Ramadi fell to ISIS is a fact that has come up before: Iraquis didn’t want to fight ISIS and many simply cut and run.
And that’s more than a monkey wrench in the longtime American strategy of fighting terror in Iraq and leave the country to stand on its own two feet. Right now it looks as if the country is standing on its own to feet– but many of its fighters are using their feet to run in the direction away from ISIS. The Daily Beast reports:
In the face of a vicious ISIS assault, the Iraqi army ran away, leaving the American plan to beat the terror group in tatters.
They saw the ISIS attack coming—and they ran.
U.S. military officials believe that the city of Ramadi fell to the self-proclaimed Islamic State over the weekend in large part because the Iraqi security forces there fled in the face of an ISIS assault.
So are you best qualified as an Iraqi security force member if you have good training in fighting, or won a lot of track meets in school?
But this is most assuredly no laughing matters it a)underlines the weakness of U.S. long term strategy and b)underlines in big magic marker strokes what a mistake the Iraq war was — sold to the United States, the world, and trusting American voters under false pretenses and seemingly based more on wishful thinking than solid worst-case scenario analysis, and c) how it’ll go down in history as one of our country’s biggest military miscalculations and deceptively sold wars. In military terms, LBJ and GWB will be mentioned in the same breath.
Do the policy makers who made these decisions and sold the war to a reluctant world get called out on it?
Or do they simply wind up in another administration and feed new spin to people trying to win the votes of voters in 2016? Or write books bashing the administration that had to try to clean up the mess that they created and still defend?
The “best defense is a good offense” isn’t going to work when history is written for these guys.
The American strategy to fight ISIS in Iraq depends on local troops standing up to the terror army. That Iraqi forces chose not to fight—much as they did last year when ISIS sacked the city of Mosul—reinforced how little the U.S. effort has bolstered Iraq’s security. The Pentagon has said it trained 7,000 Iraqi forces since Mosul’s collapse and launched more than 3,700 airstrikes, hitting 6,300 targets. In the month leading to Ramadi’s collapse, the U.S.-led coalition conducted 165 airstrikes in Ramadi alone, according to military statistics. And yet, once again, the Iraqis could not mount a defense against a charging ISIS.
I’m now reading a book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” by Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss and it details among other things how Iraqui forces have a history of running from ISIS on many occasions. (A MUST READ by the way.)
The 6,000 Iraqi forces—plagued with poor equipment, bad resupply chains, and low morale—saw a series of ISIS attacks and 8 to 12 car bombs hit in Ramadi sometime Friday. In response, those troops decided to retreat to a position a few miles east and north, U.S. defense officials believe. That is, once confronted, the troops fled the fight.
The ISIS attacks were “enough to make the Iraqis believe they didn’t want to fight,” a defense official told The Daily Beast. “We’re still trying to figure out what flipped the switch.”
There are differences between how the Iraqi troops performed in Mosul and Ramadi, U.S. defense officials said. Iraqi forces held the city for more than a year, even as ISIS-controlled areas dominated the province. And while Iraqi troops stationed in Mosul last year were wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms, in Ramadi, they conducted a tactical retreat.
That said, they were a broken force—when they were supposed to be a keystone of the U.S. strategy in Iraq. Instead, the strong local ground force that the Pentagon hoped could exploit American air superiority over ISIS does not appear to exist within the Iraqi army.
“We don’t really have a strategy at all,” Robert Gates, President Obama’s former defense secretary, said Tuesday on MSNBC. “We’re basically playing this day by day.”
Day by day doesn’t not a sound — or winning strategy make.
Read the rest of the article in its entirety.
The Daily Beast also has a devastating article about an America mother whose son died in Ramadi and how she feels it was in vain:
Debbie Lee says she’s sickened that the city her son sacrificed his life defending has fallen—and furious at the Joint Chiefs chairman’s insistence Ramadi is ‘not symbolic in any way.’
Nine years after Marc Alan Lee became the first Navy SEAL killed in the Iraq War, his mother sat watching TV images of the black flag of ISIS flying over the city where her son died.
“Gut wrenching,” Debbie Lee said on Monday. “The sacrifices that were made, the blood that’s been shed.”
The city is Ramadi, and the mother had gone there herself in the year after her son was cut down in a ferocious firefight where he showed such courage that he was awarded a Silver Star.
His comrades had further honored him by naming their Ramadi base Camp Marc Alan Lee. His mother returned from her visit to the city in 2007 with some of its powdery soil in a clear plastic bag. The bag and its contents sat in her Arizona home as the news came that Ramadi had fallen to ISIS.
“That place where my son’s blood was shed,” she said.
It was tough enough without military spin setting her off:
This past April, Debbie had seen remarks about Ramadi made at a press conference by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dempsey suggested that the city is “not symbolic in any way” and that losing it would not be a major setback.
“I would much rather that Ramadi not fall, but it won’t be the end of the campaign should it fall,” General Dempsey said.
So she did what many people do when they’re seething with grief, or anger at something some one said: she put her feelings in writing. She wrote him an open letter:
“I am shaking and tears are flowing down my cheeks as I watch the news and listen to the insensitive, pain-inflicting comments made by you in regards to the fall of Ramadi,” the mother told the general. “My son and many others gave their future in Ramadi. Ramadi mattered to them. Many military analysts say that as goes Ramadi so goes Iraq.”
She went on, “What about the troops who sacrificed their limbs and whose lives will never be the same? Our brave warriors who left a piece of themselves in Ramadi? What about the troops who struggle with PTS/TBI who watched their teammates breathe their last or carried their wounded bodies to be medevac’d out of Ramadi?”
She continued: “You, sir, owe an apology to the families whose loved ones’ blood was shed in Ramadi. Ramadi matters to us and is very symbolic to us. You need to apologize to our troops whose bodies were blown to pieces from IEDs and bullet holes leaving parts and pieces behind. Ramadi matters to them. You need to apologize to our troops who endured the extreme temperatures and battled the terrorists in some of the worst battlefields in Iraq. Ramadi matters to them. They carry vivid memories of the battles and the teammates whose future is gone. Ramadi matters to them.”
She concluded: “You and this administration have minimized that Ramadi could fall. Now you are minimizing that it is falling, but you Sir WILL NOT minimize the sacrifice my son Marc Lee made or any of our brave warriors!”
She did get an answer and apology from Dempsy. Read the rest of the piece to read it in full.
And then there’s the heart wrenching letter her son sent her from the field i 2006 that contained this:
Ask yourself when was the last time you donated clothes that you hadn’t worn out.
When was the last time you paid for a random stranger’s cup of coffee, meal or maybe even a tank of gas? When was the last time you helped a person with the groceries into or out of their car?
Think to yourself and wonder what it would feel like if when the bill for the meal came and you were told it was already paid for.
More random acts of kindness like this would change our country and our reputation as a country.
It is not unknown to most of us that the rest of the world looks at us with doubt towards our humanity and morals.
I am not here to preach or to say look at me, because I am just as at fault as the next person. I find that being here makes me realize the great country we have and the obligation we have to keep it that way.
The 4th has just come and gone and I received many emails thanking me for helping keep America great and free. I take no credit for the career path I have chosen; I can only give it to those of you who are reading this, because each one of you has contributed to me and who I am.
However what I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.
This is our real part to keep America free! HAPPY 4th Love Ya
Marc Lee
P.S. Half way through the deployment can’t wait to see all of your faces.
Read the article in full.
MUST READING:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.