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The Fall of Ramadi
I’m sure you’ve heard the ghastly descriptions and fully understand the meaning of this. I don’t need to rehearse it. I’m puzzled by this:
The fall of Ramadi, despite intensified American airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city, represented the biggest victory so far this year for the Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls.
Intensified airstrikes? Here’s the Department of Defense’s own list of airstrikes carried out near Ramadi since parts of the city fell under ISIS control late last month. If there have been others, they haven’t reported them.
On April 28, they reported one strike: “Near Ramadi, an airstrike destroyed an ISIL excavator.” On the 29th, one strike: “Near Ramadi, an airstrike destroyed three ISIL tanker trucks.” On the 30th, two strikes: “Near Ramadi, two airstrikes struck two ISIL tactical units, destroying an ISIL fighting position and an ISIL structure.” On May 1, three strikes: “Near Ramadi, three airstrikes struck two ISIL tactical units, destroying an ISIL fighting position, and an ISIL resupply cache.”
On May 1, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder briefed Centcom via teleconference. He said there had been no significant changes in Ramadi during the past week. Iraqi forces continued to hold the key ground. ISIS was trying to keep the territory they’d captured in the east. “We expect Ramadi to remain contested,” he said. “ISIL has shown that Beiji and Ramadi are strategically important to them, and they are committing a significant amount of limited resources to secure these locations. [my emphasis]”
There are no further reports of air strikes near Ramadi until May 4, when only one was reported. “Near Ramadi, an airstrike destroyed four ISIL caches.” On May 5, one strike: “Near Ramadi, an airstrike struck an ISIL large tactical unit, destroying three ISIL structures, three ISIL tanks and an ISIL armored vehicle.” On May 6, two: “Near Ramadi, two airstrikes struck one large and one small ISIL tactical units, destroying four ISIL structures and an ISIL mortar system.” There were none on May 7, and none were reported again until May 11: “Near Ramadi, one airstrike struck an ISIL tactical unit, destroying an ISIL fighting position.”
None were reported on the 12th or 13th. There were two on the 14th: “Near Ramadi, two airstrikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL fighting position.”
That evening, ISIS launched a massive attack against Iraqi units using car bombs, mortars, and snipers. But there are no reports of airstrikes near Ramadi on the next day.
The day after that, I suppose, is when the airstrikes “intensified.” The Department of Defense reported four on May 16: “Near Ramadi, four airstrikes struck one large and three small ISIL tactical units, destroying four ISIL vehicles, three ISIL structures, two ISIL fighting positions and an ISIL vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.” There were seven on May 17: “Near Ramadi, seven airstrikes struck one large and five small ISIL tactical units and an ISIL IED facility, destroying four ISIL resupply structures, three ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL buildings, two ISIL heavy machine guns, an ISIL VBIED and an ISIL motorcycle.”
There’s the intensifying air campaign: 25 airstrikes in total. That’s it. There are hundreds of strike aircraft within reach. We knew they were committing resources to Ramadi. We knew their objective and what would happen if they achieved it. It might be true that a war can’t be won through air power alone, but how can you know unless you try? Were they just sitting there with a bag of popcorn?
Then, as we know, yesterday ISIS took full control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. The Iraqi units abandoned their US-provided equipment–again. ISIS seized it all (apparently including RPGs) and no doubt more than replaced the materiel they’d lost to our intensified airstrikes. The reports of massacres are streaming in:
Ramadi’s mayor, Dalaf al-Kubaisi, said more than 250 civilians and security forces had been killed over the past two days, including dozens of police and other government supporters shot dead in the streets or their homes, along with their wives, children and other family members.
The mayor confirmed that 90 percent of the city is in ISIS’s hands. McClatchy is citing a local police officer who says 30 U.S. Humvees were abandoned to ISIS in just one neighborhood (Malaab), and the Ramadi-Baghdad road is “completely controlled by the Islamic State.”
As this is happening, the Pentagon fronts its own version of Baghdad Bob:
“Ramadi has been contested since last summer and ISIL now has the advantage,” Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said, using another acronym for Islamic State. She said the loss of the city would not mean the overall Iraq military campaign was turning in Islamic State’s favor, but acknowledged it would give the group a ‘propaganda boost.’
To counter the propaganda boost, they released the stirring story of our special forces dropping from the sky in a Blackhawk, engaging in hand-to-hand combat, killing a terrorist, blowing holes through buildings, freeing a slave, and saving some artefacts without hurting any women and children. Go, team America!
Are we children? ISIS now physically and symbolically rules Anbar, where more than 1,300 American soldiers and Marines died. They’ve got Mosul. There are reportedly no soldiers left to defend the roads to Baghdad. They’re on the the outskirts of Palmyra, the bride of the desert, the capital of the Arab Queen Zenobia in the third century A.D; they’ve murdered 23 civilians there, and they’ll surely bulldoze the city, just as they did Nimrud.
And instead of using our airforce–we could try that, at least–we’re countering “propaganda boosts” with “propaganda boosts.” But ours are directed at our own citizens. The rest of the world didn’t know or care who Abu Sayyaf was, and his death was definitely not, as our officials said, “a major blow to the Islamic State.” (And everyone and his uncle is called Abu Sayyaf, anyway. Abu means he’s Sayyaf’s father, it’s meaningless. Umm Sayyaf would be Sayyaf’s mother, but we’re saying she’s his wife. We didn’t know her name, so we gave her one that made no sense. We’ve been involved in this part of the world for decades, but we didn’t even try to sound credible about this. Why not?)
Published in General
@Franco, #29: Its more than that. American soldiers would face a similar danger, but they wouldn’t run.
It comes down to this: one has to believe that what you’re fighting for is better than the alternative
@ctlaw, #27:
The problem is that your analysis used loaded terms. Calling someone a “fanatic” is a way of dismissing them and diminishing their power. Which is fine, but don’t base your public policy solutions on your own loaded terms.
Sorry to inform that you are wrong, Adam. It’s because ISIS is supported by Obama. They are his true friends. When will people quit listening to him and just judge his actions?
Broadly speaking, I agree. I think that the ‘super-hawks’–Messers. Kesler, Codevilla, Helprin–were most clear-eyed, least deluded about what could or should be done. This is not to say they should have been listened to down to the last semi-colon, but at least every departure from their cold, unlovely view of things should have been scrutinized carefully.
As for the light it sheds on what should be done now, I think the terrorists have got to be wiped out because they do give America a terrible reputation. I also think that America has finally got to make some of these puny figures pay the price for the peace they want. Whoever wants peace from IS or Iran can be made to pay the price–all have supported terrorism in the past….
Titus #34 – here I can agree with you. We haven’t yet made our peace with being the empire that we are. We should emulate the Dorsai of SF and get paid for our services. Extract it if necessary.
It’s only a loaded term when one is misusing it. I was using it quite accurately and hardly dismissively in a comment that starts: “The impressive thing about ISIS...”
Well, look at the Saudis–what kind of monies does the House of Saud put into funding Wahhabi insanities? They are obviously unafraid of the consequences. They have to learn better. An American foreign policy that ignores that America cannot in perpetuity ignore its interests & that others do not ignore theirs is a disaster–an ongoing disaster, if Americans are still watching. There’s a country desperately in need of an attractive figure telling people what goes on… When I heard about Ramadi, I immediately thought–did not Chris Kyle write at some length about fighting there? It’s all for nothing now… Well, Americans need to learn not to waste victories…
Battle Damage Assessments are one part reporting, one part guesswork, one part wishful thinking, and one part propaganda. By the time we stopped bombing the Serbs, we had destroyed more military equipment than they had in inventory.
I’d love to hear the definition of large and small tactical units. Is “large” platoon sized? Does small go all the way down to a fire team (four guys)? Smaller? How about a Toyota pickup with a Ma Deuce bolted to the bed?
I know what a “fighting position” is. It is a foxhole. If the foxhole is occupied, are we taking credit for destroying both a fighting position and a tactical unit?
(Bombing an unoccupied fighting position is essentially bombing a hole. One usually just ends up with a bigger hole.)
Whatever we decide to do, doing this isn’t going to accomplish anything except make us look silly.
It might be more accurate to say that, like most upper middle class liberals, Obama suffers from a peculiar form of mental illness (and it is a mental illness) whereby he cannot differentiate between what is real, what he wishes to be real, and what his peers want to be real. All three are equally “real” to him.
I moved to the SF Bay Area last year. I’m always surprised by how right-wing (not in the American sense of the worse, but in a peculiar, sort of 18th-century aristocratic/quasi-royalist European way) the people here are, as opposed to the left-wing paragons of virtue they present themselves as.
This is a black day in American history.
This is a direct attack on us.
The Left spent so much time attacking GW instead of trying to understand what he was doing that there is now no response to this attack.
This is what GW was trying to warn us against for eight years: they attack when they perceive us to be weak. Let me repeat that: they attack when they perceive us to be weak. Such as when we sign a laughable arms “treaty” with Iran.
Welcome to the weak world of Kerry-Clinton-Obama.
What GW understood that few others do is that the terrorists are emboldened by every small victory.
Weak people see this abusive bully as perhaps satisfied by his latest victory. Maybe the enemy will stop now. He has enough. I can rest.
Wrong. It merely whets his appetite for more. He will not stop until he is stopped.
I really wish GW would come out of retirement.
Not where they were needed.
That’s a large region.
Where the Right misreads the Left is that the Right thinks the Left is dovish. That is not true. They are every bit as deadly and dictatorial as the most ardent warmonger on the Right. I point to the Clinton-Reno bloodbath at the hands of General Wesley Clark in the siege of Waco, Texas, as evidence. Truman and the H-bomb.
They mismanage events until a war becomes inevitable.
GW was a good manager. Handle problems when they are small. Iraq was a small problem compared to the entire Middle East, which is what we are looking at now.
We need to see the loss of Ramadi as serious.
The Clinton years looked just like the Obama years. Every brush against Al Qaeda and the Taliban ended with our retreating and Clinton’s covering it up, starting with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Those daily car bombings in Israel? What’s one more. Don’t worry about it.
I remember hearing an interview in which a Clinton defense or state department high-mucky-muck was talking about Osama bin Laden. It was clear they recognized he was a threat. The Clinton administration simply did nothing about it.
Madness. Are the Israeli’s secretly in bed with ISIS too? After all, the black flag has been waving beneath the Golan Heights for months now, and Hamas has had to deny reports that ISIS influence is expanding in Gaza. Israel remains focused on Iran and its proxies, and to that end has refrained from attacking ISIS, presumably under the rationale of “the enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, then at least not my enemy right now.”
No, this is a direct attack on the fragmenting Iraqi government. Anbar is not Alabama.
For better or worse what GW did was remove the lid on the pressure cooker on the region. It was thought by pro-democracy activists that removing the tyrants in the region (Hussein, Assad, Mubarak, et. al.) would unleash a flourishing of pro-western democratic sentiment a la the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Long story short, they were wrong. Sectarian infighting and the weakness of secular, moderate “civil society” in the region doomed the project, and now we’re at daggers drawn between a Shi’ite and minority bloc very competently led by Iran, and a Sunni block led in a panicky and weak fashion by the Saudis and Gulf emirates. ISIS is the direct offspring of this conflict, which our adventurism in the region unleashed. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth the gamble, but we can’t rewrite history just because we don’t like it.
Israel isn’t hitting ISIS at all. No harsh words for them?
I wonder if some perverse theorist in the Pentagon with an idea like this: “The only way to make a unified nation out of Iraq is to get the Sunni tribesmen to fight side-by-side with the Shi’a. Enough with the democracy-building seminars. We’ll let ISIS overrun Ramadi. After they tribes and the Shi’a join up to fight them off, they’ll bond and forget the past and remember they’re all Iraqis.”
Never mind that it’s a million times more likely that another 50 thousand men, women, and children will be slaughtered in the coming week, in the cruelest way possible; that the victor will be ISIS or Iran; and we’ll look like the sick or impotent superpower that sailed above this with all our multi-billion dollar fighter aircraft, peered curiously at this horror while it was all happening, and said, “Gee.” No, not that we’ll look like it–it will be true.
I’m speculating, and at some point the speculation bumps up against “conspiracy theory,” but conspiracy theories happen when you’ve got situations like this–“air campaign, air campaign, air campaign,” how many times have we heard that? And the numbers are clear: no air campaign. We didn’t even try to stop this. And we knew what was happening. And it wasn’t for a lack of the most powerful air force in the world: we do have that, and a lot of it is in that region. And it wasn’t for a lack of public support for using air power to stop ISIS: That’s overwhelming. So why?
They think passive-aggressively. They are bureaucrats in the worst possible sense. If we ignore disturbances, from the angry taxpayer to the attack on Ramadi, it will go away. Problem solved.
That’s my analysis on my charitable days.
On my worst days, I ask myself why our president’s middle name is “Hussein.”
Was FDR a communist at heart? You’d throw me out of Ricochet if you heard what my heart is saying.
Is that a joke? Are the Jews supposed to involve themselves in Arab wars? How about the danger to Israel from this involvement?
I’m doing some work this month on a book coming out soon by Ed Hiner called First, Fast, Fearless: How to Lead Like a Navy SEAL. It’s a business book, but I think it will fast become a classic like Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Our military are our finest. We need to listen to them and respect them.
We paid a high price for Ramadi.
I can’t believe we are losing it.
Percival & Claire,
When air strikes are with Mach II fighters off a carrier from a 500 miles away, the strikes aren’t pinpointed second by second as they need to be on a battle field in support of a ground troops.
The A10 was designed from the ground up to do this job. They’ve already done it in Iraq & Afghanistan and recently were key in helping the Peshmerga against ISIS.
Lower, slower, with precision and coordination with what’s happening on the ground, an A10 can stay over the battle and hit the enemy again and again with devastating effect. If even a grass field is available 100 miles away the A10 can land refuel & reload and be right back out on top of the enemy. ISIS finally ran in full retreat from the hell of the A10 attack in support of the Peshmerga.
As for an answer to your question, Claire, as to why we didn’t do Ramadi in a more effective manner, I can only say one thing. It is not a good idea to trust Obama. The Ukranians know this, the Saudis know this, the Syrians know this, the Israelis know this, the Nigerians know this, and even the Iranians know this. I am hoping that the American people by now know this.
Regards,
Jim
Marci, don’t give in to your worst days–FDR was no communist, for all his faults. He was also a very good commander in war. It would be deeply unfair to be understanding of all the difficulties & ignorance faced by Mr. W. Bush without understanding the far worse situation in which FDR found himself. I cannot believe you to be so unfair…
As for Mr. Obama’s foreign policy–you need not listen to your better nature not to fall for these fantasies that our fears so readily paint–you need only remember how proud of himself he is, how unfalteringly he is willing to falter merely in order not to give up his illusions–he would never concoct conspiratorial stuff if it involved him looking so bad.
It is a mistake to look at political affairs as if the outcome had been planned–I’m sure you know that.
Israel is not shy about pursuing its interests in the region (as it should be). If Israel thought that ISIS was a direct threat to it on the scale of Hezbollah or Hamas I have no doubt it would be intervening somehow. After all, they are close allies with the Jordanians, and ISIS recently has stepped up its activities in the Hashemite Kingdom.
If you want to know what the Left is thinking these days, look no further than Pope Francis’s choice of Nakba Day to recognize the Palestinian state.
It wasn’t ours to begin with.
Yup. Sorry. :)
They’re not telling the world they are, are they? And reputational matters aside, no, I don’t think they could do it. They’re too small and too vulnerable and have no support in the region at all. We’re a global superpower that nominally assembled a coalition to prosecute an air war against ISIS.
If the White House said, honestly, “We don’t think it’s in American interests to repel ISIS or do a think from keeping them from running over Ramadi and Baghdad, and here’s why,”–and offered anything that sounded like a logical or strategic reason–I would be willing to listen, at least. But we’re saying that it’s very much in our interest, boasting about (insignificant) triumphs in our campaign to repel them, talking about how this can be done and is being down through a smart, long-term use of air power, and then not using air power. And somehow the media is writing “despite the increasing air campaign, despite the increasing air campaign, despite the increasing air campaign” even though it didn’t happen.
We knew it was happening. Ryder warned, “They’re committing resources to retaking Ramadi” on May 1. By the 16th, when it was basically all over, there had been seven strikes. Then they “increased the campaign” after the horse was already out of the barn. I mean–we’ve got this in the region. Why did we put this awesome firepower in the Gulf and say it was there to fight ISIS if we didn’t mean to use it?
1) Air power can’t stop massacres. Planes are great at blowing up large formations like tank columns, or static installations like power stations, headquarters, and munitions dumps. They’re not good at holding back light-infantry offensives into civilian areas. Infantry has to do that. Air support is useful, but it’s not an all-purpose panacea.
2) At some point this does have to be about the Iraqis. We can’t hold their country together for them. If they’re unwilling to defend themselves there’s not a ton we can do short of declaring them a colonial protectorate and re-deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers there (which I guarantee you public opinion would not support). It’s a tragedy what’s going on over there, but tragedies happen quite a lot, and they’re doing it to themselves. At some point we have to pursue our own interests.
3) There is no scenario where ISIS/Saudi Arabia or Iran doesn’t “win” this. Those are the two sides in this conflict.
Air power is incredibly good at stopping an enemy on the move. Against a column of ISIS trucks or an artillery piece? Invincible. And if they can’t take the city–and they got there, somehow–they can’t massacre everyone in it. The debate about air power is about whether it could dislodge them from the territory they had (and it sure helped in Tikrit), not whether it could prevent them from acquiring new territory; and about whether they’d just melt away from it and come back as soon as we left, not whether they could sail through it like supermen if we were there to use it and did; and about whether you can use air power to create any kind of functional state in the end (you can’t), not whether it’s of use in circumstances like this, which are exactly the circumstances in which it is effective.
You need not apologize–I just thought you could use a word or two & hopefully there is usually someone wiser than me to write them… Cheer up, though, America has been through worse & emerged. It is right that we suffer today, all who believe in the justice of her cause; but today is not the end-
This you have no way of knowing. America is famous for entering wars the warring parties hoped or feared would not concern her.