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FALL OF RAMADI: I.S. CAPTURES KEY CITY CLOSE TO BAGHDAD EXPOSING WEAKNESS OF U.S.-LED INTERVENTION

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication.

 

Did U.S. Policy Allow Ramadi to Fall?: Jonathan Spyer, PJ Media, May 18, 2015 — The fall of Ramadi to the fighters of the Islamic State is a disaster for the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Islamic State Is Winning in Iraq: Norman Ricklefs & Derek Harvey, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2015— In the closing years of the Vietnam War it was often noted sardonically that the “victories” against the Viet Cong were moving steadily closer to Saigon.

Why Does Baghdad Let ISIS Keep Winning?: Jacob Siegel & Michael Pregent, Daily Beast, May 18, 2015 — The road to Baghdad runs through Ramadi.
White House Hopefuls: Iraq War was a Mistake: Connie Cass, Times of Israel, May 18, 2015— A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

 

On Topic Links

 

Were We Right to Take Out Saddam?: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, May 19, 2015

Fall of Ramadi Raises Doubts About US Strategy in Iraq: Robert Burns, AP, May 19, 2015

Time for Military to Admit ISIS is Winning: Max Boot, Commentary, May 18, 2015

My Son Died for Ramadi. Now ISIS Has It.: Michael Daly, Daily Beast, May 19, 2015

         

                            

DID U.S. POLICY ALLOW RAMADI TO FALL?                                                                        

Jonathan Spyer                                                    

PJ Media, May 18, 2015

 

The fall of Ramadi to the fighters of the Islamic State is a disaster for the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The taking of the city brings IS to just over 60 miles from Baghdad. In addition to showcasing the low caliber of the Iraqi security forces, the events surrounding the fall of the city lay bare the contradictions at the heart of Western policy in Iraq.

 

Prime Minister Abadi had ordered the garrison in Ramadi to stand firm. He hoped to see a successful stand in the city as a prelude to a government retaking of Anbar province, over half of which is still in IS hands. But in a manner reminiscent of the fall of Mosul in June 2014, Iraqi security forces ignored orders to defend Ramadi, and fled eastwards to the neighboring town of Khalidiyeh. This left Ramadi to the tender mercies of the fighters of the Islamic State, who have reportedly since slaughtered at least 500 people. It is important to note that even U.S. airstrikes were not sufficient to prevent the debacle. As of now, Shia militias are heading for the city’s outskirts. A militia-led counterattack is expected in the coming days. A further advance eastwards by the Sunni jihadis, at least in the immediate future, is unlikely.

 

So what is behind the failure of the Iraqi security forces and the continued advance of the jihadis? On the simplest level, the greater motivation and determination of the IS fighters explains their continued successes against the Iraqis. The jihadis are all volunteers. Not all of them are highly skilled fighters, but their level of motivation is correspondingly very high. By contrast, Iraqi soldiers are often serving far from home, defending communities for whom they have little concern. Most joined the army for the salary. Their unwillingness to engage against the murderous jihadis of the Islamic State is not hard to understand or explain. However, this problem has now been apparent for nearly a year, ever since the Sunni jihadis first crashed across the border from Syria last June. So why has it not been addressed? The blame for this cannot be placed at the feet of low ranking Iraqi soldiers.

 

The blame lies at the policymaking level. The United States is committed to the territorial unity of Iraq. It therefore is determined to relate to the government of Haider al-Abadi as the sole authority in the country.

The problem with this stance is two-fold. Firstly, it precludes providing arms directly to the elements who are most willing to use them against the Islamic State (namely, the Kurdish Peshmerga and further south, the elements among the Sunni tribes whom the U.S. aided during the “surge” in the 2006-2007 period). In the north, this has not prevented the Kurds from successfully defending the area west of Erbil (with the vital assistance of coalition air power). But it has served to keep the Kurds militarily dependent on the coalition, thus reducing the possibility of their making a bid for independence from Baghdad in the immediate future.

 

Secondly, and more importantly, the U.S. commitment to the territorial unity of Iraq is leading to a willful blindness regarding the actual nature of the government in Baghdad and its true sources of strength and support. The supposedly legitimate armed forces of Baghdad are, as has been witnessed again in Ramadi, not fit for the purpose. The true defenders of Baghdad and of the government are right now heading toward Ramadi. They are the forces of the “Hashd al-Shaabi” (popular mobilization). They are the Shia militias, supported by Iran. These militias are the wall behind which the Amadi government shelters. The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.

 

It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option:  direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south. This support of Shia Islamism is taking place because of the conviction in Western capitals — most importantly, of course, Washington, D.C. — that the advance of Iran and the building of Iranian strength in Lebanon and in the collapsed states of Iraq and Syria is not a phenomenon to be prevented. Rather, Western capitals believe that growing Iranian influence can be accommodated and perhaps even allied with.

 

This conviction combined with the desire to maintain the fictions of “Iraq” and “Syria” are the foundations of current policy. For these reasons, in the coming days we will witness U.S. and Western air power, astonishingly, supporting Shia Islamist militants as they battle with Sunni Islamist militants. Meanwhile, overtly pro-Western forces further north lack arms. The Islamic State just took Ramadi. In Western capitals where Middle East policy is made, folly is engaged on a similarly triumphant march.

 

                                                                       

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ISLAMIC STATE IS WINNING IN IRAQ                                                                         

Norman Ricklefs & Derek Harvey                                                                                

Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2015

 

In the closing years of the Vietnam War it was often noted sardonically that the “victories” against the Viet Cong were moving steadily closer to Saigon. The same could be said of Baghdad and the victories claimed against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq in the past year. The ISIS takeover of Ramadi in the Anbar province over the weekend exposed the hollowness of the reported progress against ISIS. The U.S.-led bombing campaign in support of Iraqi forces isn’t working.

 

Clearly, the Iraqi government needs greater military assistance if it is to defeat what is proving to be a formidable enemy. ISIS in Iraq, the successor of al Qaeda in Iraq, is made up of Iraqi Sunnis and foreign Islamist fighters, similar to those the U.S. Army and Marines fought so hard for so many years. ISIS has routinely defeated other rebel groups in neighboring Syria and claimed large swaths of that country’s territory. The militants almost took the Iraqi Kurdish capital city of Erbil in February, despite the fierce resistance of the vaunted fighters of the Kurdish Peshmerga.

 

Shiite militias—some armed by Iran and manned by Iranian fighters—haven’t performed well against ISIS on the battlefield. After a month of fighting in Tikrit, during which the Iraqi media estimate some 5,000 Shiite militiamen were killed, ISIS abandoned the city once the U.S. and its allies began airstrikes in late March. That is what happens in guerrilla warfare. Having extracted its price in blood, ISIS withdrew rather than endure heavy casualties. When Iraqi armed forces confronted ISIS in Anbar province in the second week of April, the Islamists responded with the massive counterattack that ultimately took Ramadi, the provincial capital, and they also attacked the Beiji oil refinery. ISIS now effectively controls the refinery, though it is too damaged to operate for now.

 

We are in communication with members of the Iraqi military, who report that Iraq’s special forces performed well against ISIS fighters in Ramadi. The special forces are the only ones with the technical ability to call in accurate airstrikes. But the regular Iraqi army continues to struggle. In a fight in northern Anbar last month, Iraqi soldiers were butchered after they ran out of ammunition, while a convoy of armored Humvees sent to rescue them was ambushed with a senior commander of the Iraqi army among the many killed.

 

The defense of Ramadi, according to our sources, was largely left to local Sunni tribesman who were small in number and unreliable allies. The Iraqi government may now be responding to the Ramadi challenge—on Monday 3,000 mostly Shiite paramilitary forces were reported massing outside the city, intent on trying to retake it. Tens of thousands of refugees from Anbar are now testing the capabilities of Iraq’s authorities. It is no coincidence that terrorist bombings in Baghdad, which had enjoyed a prolonged period of relative quiet, have increased as refugees began flooding into the city. Now there are scores of bombings weekly. ISIS has always fomented strife between communities, and no doubt hopes that Shiite militias will retaliate against the Sunnis fleeing Anbar.

 

U.S.-led airstrikes have allowed the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite, to consolidate its power even as it cedes ground to Iranian-backed Shiite militias of questionable motivations. The airstrikes may not have reversed ISIS gains, but the bombing campaign has complicated ISIS recruitment, financing, command and control, logistics and operational capabilities. But that is not enough. The U.S. needs to play a more robust role against ISIS before conditions in Iraq deteriorate further. The Pentagon should employ more ground operations by Special Operations forces, like the raid in eastern Syria on Friday that took out ISIS commander Abu Sayyaf. More Apache attack helicopters and transport planes are also needed, as is a brigade dedicated to improving operational command and intelligence support.

 

Moreover, the Pentagon needs to end the “boots on the ground” shell game of relying on temporary deployments to work around the president’s 3,000 personnel cap, which has proved dysfunctional. Most of the U.S. troops currently in Iraq are training and advising Iraqi forces. That is useful, but more need to be embedded with Iraqi units to improve the accuracy of U.S.-led airstrikes. American logistics assets, whether uniformed or contractor, should be deployed to supply the Iraqi army—the least we can do is ensure that Iraqi soldiers don’t have to worry about running out of ammunition. In addition, the U.S. must return to its role as an honest broker between Iraq’s majority Shiites and minority Sunnis, as it did in 2006-07 with great success.

 

Like it or not, the U.S. is the only country with the strength and know-how to rid Iraq of ISIS. Iran’s proxy forces are on the defensive in Syria and have made no overall progress in Iraq. Some argue that Iran isn’t serious in trying to defeat ISIS. It’s more likely that Iran isn’t capable of doing so. What is needed is decisive U.S. leadership. Without it, the long-term entrenchment of Islamic State in Iraq may become a disturbing reality.                                       

 

Contents                                                                                      

   

WHY DOES BAGHDAD LET ISIS KEEP WINNING?                                                               

Jacob Siegel & Michael Pregent                                                                                             

Daily Beast, May 18, 2015

 

The road to Baghdad runs through Ramadi. So why hasn’t the Iraqi government done more to reinforce the city, which has been under siege from ISIS forces since early 2014, even before the fall of Mosul? The answer is politics: Ramadi is predominantly Sunni, and powerful elements of Baghdad’s Shia ruling class fear empowering Iraq’s Sunnis more than they fear allowing ISIS to continue attacking and bleeding the country’s Sunni regions. “Ramadi is very close to Baghdad,” said General Najim Abed al-Jabouri, who was recently appointed Nineveh operations commander for the Iraqi army. “If the terrorists control Ramadi, Baghdad is under a bigger threat.”

 

The general is planning and eventually will lead the effort to retake Mosul. But that can’t happen until Ramadi is pacified. The Sunni force to retake Mosul has not been built yet. The force to take back Ramadi exists, but it needs weapons, ammo, and more important, Baghdad’s willingness to trust it enough not to disarm it afterward. It may also need Iran’s approval. The strategic goals of Baghdad are currently aligned with Iran’s: to secure infrastructure and negate Sunni threats along the Shia-sectarian fault lines in and around Baghdad, Diyala, and Salah-ad-Din. This strategy is evident in the Tikrit offensive and the commitment of limited forces for the stalled offensive in Baiji. For the Tikrit offensive, a force of reportedly 30,000 fighters was generated to liberate Saddam Hussein’s hometown from ISIS and decide who gets to resettle it.

 

Shia militia-led Peoples Mobilization Units (PMUs) outnumbered Iraqi army and National Police units on the ground. These militias and paramilitary forces were led by Katiab Hizbollah’s al-Muhindis and Badr’s Hadi al-Ameri. Just behind the scenes, Iran made no secret of its role planning the operation and the leading role played by its Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani. The rallying cry for the offensive was to avenge the Camp Speicher massacre of June 2014, when ISIS executed 1,700 Shia cadets. It was also a symbolic operation to move into the Sunni heartland and demonstrate that Shia militias aligned with Iran can, acting alone, negate future Sunni threats to Baghdad and, by extension, Tehran.

 

It didn’t work out that way. The Iran-planned, militia-led offensive stalled, and Iraq’s government requested U.S. airstrikes to break the stalemate. The United States delivered the airstrikes on the condition that militias not take part in the operation. They reluctantly complied, and the U.S. air support broke ISIS’s hold on the city. But what now for Tikrit? What prevents ISIS, a group fond of launching counterattacks, from overrunning the city again? Iraq’s government had announced that thousands of Sunni tribesmen would be part of the effort to clear ISIS from Tikrit. But their role never materialized. After Tikrit was cleared, without a force viewed as legitimate left to hold the city, it has become a lawless ghost town.

 

There is no emotional magnet event in Ramadi to generate a force to retake it, no rallying cry to motivate Shia men from the south to help their Sunni brothers push ISIS back in Anbar, the province where Ramadi is located. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are less willing than ever to fight in places absent Shia political interests and sectarian ties. And the Iraqi security apparatus is increasingly beholden to Shia political parties unwilling to push their fighters into areas without those ties.

 

Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has made overtures to Iraq’s Sunnis, exposing himself to some political risk in the process. In early April, Abadi visited Anbar, showcasing his effort to bring Sunni tribesmen into the volunteer military units known as the Hashd, which have become the backbone of Iraq’s army. One photo taken during the Anbar visit showed Abadi handing out rifles to Sunni volunteers. But the prime minister faces a powerful opposition led by Iraq’s former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is closely aligned with Iran and with Iraq’s powerful Iranian-backed militias. Even if Abadi’s gestures to Iraq’s Sunnis are entirely sincere, and many in the country doubt that, carrying the policies through could cost him his own power. “Abadi can’t realistically empower Sunnis without losing his own power,” said Sterling Jensen, who worked closely with Anbar’s Sunni tribal leaders as an interpreter for the U.S. government from 2006 to 2008 and stays in close contact with several high-level officials in Anbar. “If he empowers Sunnis, the Shia militias and his constituency in Baghdad will strip him of his power.”

 

Meanwhile, without a Sunni force in Anbar, ISIS has staged another assault and gotten closer to the seat of government power in Baghdad. A related problem with Abadi’s attempt to bring Sunnis into the security forces is how little came of it. Despite promises of arms going to Sunni volunteers in Anbar, few have been delivered, according to people there. Multiple people in Anbar who once fought alongside the U.S. against an earlier incarnation of ISIS “haven’t been getting the weapons they need,” Jensen said. And what weapons are delivered in Anbar, he said, go to people “connected to the Iraqi army or the joint operations command” rather than to the kind of local irregular forces critical to Anbar’s defense.

 

General Jabouri acknowledged that the number of weapons sent to Anbar “wasn’t enough.” But arming the tribes is complicated by questions about their allegiance, he said. “Yes, it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t all the tribes who received them,” the general said. “But the situation in Anbar is very complex. You don’t know who is your enemy. Because of the corruption before, many of the weapons that went to Anbar from the government went to the black market or to Da’ash,” the Arabic term for ISIS. There are undoubtedly Sunni sectarians in Iraq. Some are of the religious variety, like ISIS, while others are revanchists unwilling to be ruled by or share power with the country’s Shia majority. But Baghdad has shown little interest in distinguishing between Sunnis who have actively collaborated with ISIS or are otherwise irreconcilable and those have grievances against the government but are suffering under ISIS and desperate for the resources to fight it…

[To Reade the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]                                                                         

                                                                       

Contents                                                                                      

                                          

WHITE HOUSE HOPEFULS: IRAQ WAR WAS A MISTAKE

Connie Cass                                     

Times of Israel, May 18, 2015

 

A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

Politicians hoping to be president rarely run ahead of public opinion. So it’s a revealing moment when the major contenders for president in both parties find it best to say that 4,491 Americans and countless Iraqis lost their lives in a war that shouldn’t have been waged. Many people have been saying that for years, of course. Polls show most of the public have judged the war a failure by now. Over time, more and more Republican politicians have allowed that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined Republican President George W. Bush’s rationale for the 2003 invasion.

 

It hasn’t been an easy evolution for those such as Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, now favored to win her party’s nomination, who voted for the war in 2002 while serving in the Senate. That vote, and her refusal to fully disavow it, cost her during her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, who wasn’t in the Senate in 2002 but had opposed the war. In her memoir last year, Clinton wrote that she had voted based on the information available at the time, but “I got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

 

What might seem a hard truth for a nation to acknowledge has become the safest thing for an American politician to say — even Bush’s brother. The fact that Jeb Bush, a likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016, was pressured this past week into rejecting, in hindsight, his brother’s war “is an indication that the received wisdom, that which we work from right now, is that this was a mistake,” said Evan Cornog, a historian and dean of the Hofstra University school of communication. Or as Rick Santorum, another potential Republican candidate, put it: “Everybody accepts that now.” As a senator, Santorum voted for the Iraq invasion and continued to support it for years.

 

It’s an easier question for presidential hopefuls who aren’t bound by family ties or their own congressional vote for the war, who have the luxury of judging it in hindsight, knowing full well the terrible price Americans paid and the continuing bloodshed in Iraq today. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t in Congress in 2002 and so didn’t have to make a real-time decision with imperfect knowledge. Neither was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served an earlier stint in Congress. All these Republicans said last week that, in hindsight, they would not have invaded Iraq with what’s now known about the faulty intelligence that wrongly indicated Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

 

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in an interview Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” summed up that sentiment: “Knowing what we know now, I think it’s safe for many of us, myself included, to say, we probably wouldn’t have taken” that approach. Rubio, in a long exchange on “Fox News Sunday,” tried to navigate the Iraq shoals once again, making a glass-half-full case that while the war was based on mistaken intelligence, the world still is better off with Saddam gone. These politicians didn’t go as far, however, as war critics such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a declared Republican candidate, who says it would have been a mistake even if Saddam were hiding such weapons. Paul says Saddam was serving as a counterbalance to Iran and removing him from power led to much of the turmoil now rocking the Middle East.

 

Former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, still maintain that ousting a brutal and unpredictable dictator made the world safer. In his 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” Bush said he got a “sickening feeling” every time he thought about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and he knew that would “transform public perception of the war.” But he stands by his decision. The war remains a painful topic that politicians must approach with some care. Jeb Bush, explaining his reluctance to clarify his position on the war’s start, said “going back in time and talking about hypotheticals,” the would-haves and the should-haves, does a disservice to the families of soldiers who gave their lives. When he finished withdrawing US troops in December 2011, Obama predicted a stable, self-reliant Iraqi government would take hold. Instead, turmoil and terrorism overtook Iraq and American leaders and would-be presidents are struggling with what to do next. The US now has 3,040 troops in Iraq as trainers and advisers and to provide security for American personnel and equipment.

 

For the most part, the public and the military — like the politicians — are focused less on decisions of the past than on the events of today and how to stop the Islamic State militants who have overrun a swath of Iraq and inspired terrorist attacks in the West. “The greater amount of angst in the military is from seeing the manifest positive results of the surge in 2007 and 2008 go to waste by misguided policies in the aftermath,” said retired US Army Col. Peter Monsoor, a top assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad during that increase of US troops in Iraq. “Those mistakes were huge and compounded the original error of going into Iraq in the first place,” said Monsoor, now a professor of military history at Ohio State University. “There’s plenty of blame to go around. What we need is not so much blame as to figure out what happened and use that knowledge to make better decisions going forward.”

 

Contents

                                                                                     

On Topic

 

Were We Right to Take Out Saddam?: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, May 19, 2015—Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.
Fall of Ramadi Raises Doubts About US Strategy in Iraq: Robert Burns, AP, May 19, 2015—Iraqi troops abandoned dozens of U.S military vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces when they fled Islamic State fighters in Ramadi on Sunday, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Time for Military to Admit ISIS is Winning: Max Boot, Commentary, May 18, 2015—Is ISIS on the defensive and about to lose? To listen to U.S. military commanders, you would think the answer is yes.

My Son Died for Ramadi. Now ISIS Has It.: Michael Daly, Daily Beast, May 19, 2015— 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.

              

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