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Ramadi: The Cemetery of Americans
On the one hand, I hate to write about this on Memorial Day. On the other, it seems all the more an obligation precisely because it’s Memorial Day.
Michael Fumento just sent me a link to his latest column about Ramadi. He’s as baffled as I am that the coalition stood by and watched idly as ISIS captured it. He makes the points I’ve been making and many more, but does so with more authority, given that he was embedded in Ramadi in 2006.
Ramadi is a city of vast importance, both strategic and symbolic. It’s the city that al-Qaida in Iraq chose as its headquarters, and it became the most fiercely contested area in the country. It’s why SEAL Team 3 of “American Sniper” fame was stationed there and became the most decorated SEAL unit since Vietnam.
Many experts consider the Battle of Ramadi and the “Anbar Awakening,” engineered by Capt. Travis Patriquin, the actual turning point of the war. Patriquin — who a few months after briefing me on his brilliant plan was killed in Ramadi — got the Sunni chieftains to join the Americans and Iraqi security forces to defeat al-Qaida.
Yet, bizarrely, the Obama administration wrote off Ramadi last month, declaring that defense of an oil refinery took precedence — as if we couldn’t do both. (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey claimed, “It has no symbolic meaning.” Now Dempsey says Islamic State “gains in Ramadi are a serious setback for its long-suffering inhabitants.”)
In any event, within days the refinery was out of danger. Yet, the administration still refused to defend Ramadi.
Refused? Strong words! But true.
Military officials claimed a sandstorm prevented good air support during a major IS push. The Times devoted a story to supporting this, but don’t buy it. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), used by American aircraft for the past decade, can see through sandstorms.
Moreover, on no day previously did the U.S. launch more than a handful of sorties in defense of Ramadi, and on many days it flew none.
Yet, area assets include hundreds of strike aircraft, most of which can fly several sorties a day. These comprise F-16s, F-15s, F-22s, A-10s, B-1 heavy bombers, helicopters, and Reaper and Predator drones among U.S. forces, plus aircraft of 11 other coalition nations.
A single Reaper can carry a mix of 14 bombs and missiles, meaning it’s capable of that many airstrikes. Cruise missiles are also in theater, and the U.S. can hit with heavy B-52 and B-2 bombers from anywhere in the world.
Yet with this massive armada and with assets on the ground to help identify targets, the administration seems unable to find and strike more than a handful of targets daily. A machine gun here, a truck there. By comparison, during the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh, American aircraft dropped roughly 1,300 tons of bombs daily — five tons each day for every North Vietnamese soldier besieging the base.
But it’s not just Ramadi that Obama has neglected. Fact is, the so-called air war against IS is a fraud. Rarely are more than a couple of dozen targets struck in a day throughout both Iraq and Syria.
Obama is simply keeping U.S. air power grounded. And nobody in the mainstream media is pointing this out, even though the Defense Department provides regular reports at Defense.gov. In fact, the Times referred to “intensified American airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city.” (Emphasis added.) Sheer fabrication.
Why is there talk of the air war failing when it never even began?
Read the whole column. I can’t argue with a word of it. I’m every bit as bewildered as he is. He writes, “It’s time for Congress and the presidential candidates to make this an issue. Alas, for Ramadi it’s too late. IS has scored a huge coup and the slaughter of our allies already has begun.” And I would add that it’s time for the media to make this an issue. Above all, it’s time for the American people to make this an issue. I’m at a loss to understand why they aren’t already.
Surely we owe that much to our veterans, past and future? We can say we honor them until the words “We Honor our Veterans” are stamped on every hot dog and hamburger bun in the realm, but how can that be meaningful if, at the same time, we barely bat our eyes at the fall of Ramadi, and accept these transparently lunatic excuses about “sandstorms” and the like as if we were little children?
And what of honoring our future veterans? They’re the ones who will be sent to deal with this horror when finally it becomes something even Obama can no longer ignore. By that point, they will be fighting a vastly larger, more experienced, and better-armed enemy. And at this rate, that point is not far off. We would far better honor our veterans, past and future, by demanding an honest–or even a plausible–explanation for this debacle. They’re entitled to one. And so is every American.
Published in General
The only thing this sentence lacks is a “?” at the end. [:-) Well said!
This is the important point. If ISIS threatens Baghdad, Iran will intervene. If ISIS threatens Assad, Iran will intervene. Why do we want to be clearing the way for Iran, which is a bigger strategic threat than ISIS? Why do we want to repeat the mistake we made with Saddam, removing a counterweight to Iran? We should do whatever we can to encourage continued conflict. Why? Because in this part of the world, there is always another problem arising after you solve the one immediately in front of you. There is not going to be a magic moment when peace and harmony prevail after we have crushed all our enemies.
And on a related policy matter – why are Western nations trying to prevent their citizens from going to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS? As long as we can prevent them from coming back aren’t we better off getting crazy folks like that out of our societies? Moreover, here they are subject to the cumberesome criminal justice system; there we can just use a drone strike on them.
Claire – you don’t need validation from me, obviously, but nevertheless let me say that you write so energetically, compellingly and with such erudition that it pains me to say the following: outside of a small fraction of the tiny handful of voters who even understand sentences like “It will have the effects of the decline of the Ottoman Empire on the power balance of Europe, but it will be global,” no one cares! No one in the White House cares! No one in the State Dept cares! Very few in academia care! Why would a typical voter care?
BTW – of those that do care, nearly zero have anyone in their family (let alone progeny) who are or ever will be suited up and ready to drop in on Ramadi. I’m sorry. Military failures and national elections have consequences. When the political class reinstitutes a military draft with no college deferment, I might start considering your cogent line of reasoning as pertinent to our political realities in the 2016 election season.
So how do we fix that? They’ll never learn to fight if we bail them out every time. If you’re an Iraqi soldier, why fight if you can retreat to safety and let the Americans do all the dangerous work for you?
Our strategy in Iraq — Obama’s strategy, but to be fair he inherited it from GWB — is to support a single state with an elected government in which Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds share power and control a national army capable of controlling the territory and keeping the peace. The problem is that Shiites dominate the government and have excluded Sunnis from power. Further the army is a Shiite force supplemented by Iranian militias. They might be willing to fight to defend their homes or their power base in Baghdad (that remains to be seen) but they’ve proven unwilling to die to defend (or retake) Sunni cities.
Perhaps the strategy of a unified Iraq has failed, but at this point what are the alternatives? I’d love to see the Kurds gain independence, but wouldn’t granting independence to the Sunni portions of Iraq just concede that territory to ISIS?
It’s April 1975. Only this time we get to see it in slow motion.
BTW- we do not have to really defend NATO. The treaty is nothing more than paper that can be interpeted as the powers that be wish. I suspect that our NATO commitment can be satisfied by sending a token force. Just like our commitment to the Ukraine was satisfied by doing nothing.
And we can’t blame Congress this time, which cut-off funds to South Vietnam and caused its collapse.
I think this was once Biden’s proposed solution (in a word, Balkanize it), but only when he was in the Senate and had no power to implement it. I think he has kept his pie hole shut about it since being part of Team Obama. I suppose the reasoning now would be that it’s better Iran get only a piece of Iraq then the whole thing. But the Kurds will be land-locked, which is untenable (put mildly), and Turkey is not likely to countenance an independent Kurdistan on its border (Claire can fill us in on that, I’m sure). Turkey = NATO, so it gets complicated quickly.
Yup, we’ve trained our erstwhile comrades that Americans die instead if you run and hide. Now, perhaps, Iranians will die in large numbers for them. I’m OK with that. Just no more Americans.
Mr Obama is doing what he must to give the impression that he is opposed to ISIS. Since, in fact, he is not, one cannot expect American policy to be sensible. Apparently neither Ms Berlinski nor the majority of Ricochet writes have figured out that our president wants us to lose in the Middle East.
Before you dismiss me as a raving conspiracy theorist, is there a simpler explanation?
If my thesis WERE correct, how would he behave differently?
QED
We might soon get a chance to find out how seriously we take that commitment. When Putin raises his head above the savannah grass, if he sees another gazelle separated from the herd and H. Reset Clinton continues to falter, he knows his window of opportunity closes in January 2017.
Meanwhile, our dear friends in “old” Europe have little regard for their NATO commitments and have set about unilaterally disarming. It seems every one is very happy to fight down to the last American.
Fighting to free those that choose not be is so last century. It’s time we shrugged.
Unless of course, someone other than our mostly Christian, mostly ‘fly-over country’ all-volunteer force wants to step up . . ? Manhattan? Malibu? Reinstate the draft, anyone? Hmm… I hear crickets chirping.
Besides, whatever Russia bites off, it won’t be able to chew; like a dog chasing a car, Russians have no clue what to do once they catch their prey–except to spread the same misery they impose on their own citizens. In about three generations, the locals will throw them out. We can make lots of money off them in the interim.
Well off the top of my head if he wanted us to lose he would have:
1. Obama is closing Gitmo, just in slow motion. I’m looking for a mass prisoner release to happen after the 2016 election. Maybe even abandon the base giving it back to Cuba de facto.
2. No skin off his upturned nose to keep it running. It feeds his narcissism to sit in the Oval Office and pick targets off a list.
3. Big government spying on US citizens, what’s not to like.
4. If I understand correctly, he was dragged into that kicking & screaming.
Joe – Don’t think Doc’s point was Obama wanted us to lose so much that he was willing to throw away his own re-election for it. He was willing to throw his own Party under the bus, however. From a two-chamber majority to substantial minority–quite revealing in its own right. With Dems out of power, now he can’t do some things you cite. Would he if he could? Interesting to speculate.
Also, there’s some apples-oranges problems here. For instance, given Obama’s use of Fed Govt to suppress political opposition, what makes you think he opposes domestic NSA wiretapping? That could be very useful to him.
The premise of the question was that if he wanted us to lose in the Middle East he wouldn’t do anything different than he has. I cited 4 things that he would have done differently if his sole goal was to sabotage our war effort.
Your explanations of why he did those things may well be correct, Nick, but they still refute the original premise.
ICYMI
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/president-obamas-mission-accomplished-memorial-day-moment
I’d rather see Obama eating ice cream versus pretending he gives a —- laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns before giving another preening self-adulatory apeech about his great success in [in this case] Afghanistan.
Re-invade Iraq
Invade Iran
Invade Syria
>Joseph Stanko
>
>Your explanations of why he did those
> things may well be correct, Nick, but
>they still refute the original premise.
Point taken. I’m just suffering an acute attack of Obama Derangement Syndrome this weekend,
Doc – It’s not ISIS he’s focused upon. Fighting ISIS is a tool Obama calibrates to achieve his publicly stated plan: enable Iran’s regional hegemony. He’s acting as Iran’s Expeditionary Air Force so that ISIS doesn’t mess up his plan.
But he wants that effort ‘minimum essential,’ in part to manage his political vulnerability and also so Iran will fill in the ground game more dramatically. With Iran controlling (not occupying) Baghdad, Obama thinks the region will settle down. The monarchies will eventually adjust–they are incapable of defending themselves and will have to come to an accommodation with Tehran. Egypt will see to that, once it assumes the counter-balancing role envisioned for it. He hoped the Muslim Brotherhood would hold on there, making it really a ‘no-other-option’ moment for the monarchies. But Egypt will eventually come around too, Obama believes. Then Obama the global strategist becomes General Secretary of the UN.
The key to Obama is he’s a doctrinaire Lefty who believes the pseudo-Marxist claptrap he was nurtured on. To him, Tehran really just wants ‘economic opportunities’ and ‘respect’; it doesn’t mean those things it keeps saying about us and Israel. Obama experiences mild dissociation, so at times it’s not entirely clear what he’s thinking or how the dots connect.
In 2007 Obama was asked if he’d delay a pull out from Iraq if it meant genocide. He said he wouldn’t. Obama didn’t want a SoFA. He didn’t care about midwifing the fragile peace. He just wanted to get out. He was, at least, true to his word. Now we have a genocide.
Here’s what the GOP candidate needs to say:
ISIS will not be satisfied until they control everything. They are the most threatening version of Islamic Supremacism. They are totalitarian, and they want to kill or enslave every person they can get their hands on – including Americans.
They have declared war on us. We missed the chance to crush them when it would be easy, so now we have to defeat them. Obama’s strategy in Iraq failed – it is time for something with more teeth.
The war on ISIS is not about nation-building or the spread of democracy. We will be there to destroy ISIS, and help our allies there. Obama let our allies be slaughtered by ISIS – we will stand with them. We will destroy ISIS, leave a base in Kurdistan, and send everyone else home.
Iran is not our ally, but they are the enemy of our enemy. They are welcome to join in destroying ISIS, but we will not be supporting their plans for dominating the Middle East.
ISIS is likely planning offensives against America, so we must be prepared. We will provide information on how all Americans can help defend our nation against the Islamic State. We have defeated Nazis, Imperial Japanese, and Soviet Communism – if we stand together, the Islamic State will join them.
Then I’ve failed, but that’s a failure in my power to make the case and compel people to believe me, not in the logic and power of the argument.
You bring up a very important point, though, or you remind me of it. It’s the nature of competitive democratic politics for candidates to try to win by scaring the daylights out of voters about the dangers that await them if they vote for the other candidate. The level of competing hysterias is so outsized, and the daily litany of “imminent threats to life as we know it” so loud, that it’s impossible for many people to tell the difference between politicians pressing the “doom and end of the world if you don’t elect me” button as a matter of routine and something very different from other crises and much more dangerous.
The only thing I can do is appeal to your reason. Given what we know of this situation, can you see a way this can end that doesn’t ultimately affect Americans? Is that plausible or probable, given what we know? If so, why do you think so? What part of the scenarios I’ve described as seeming most likely to me strike you as exaggerated or implausible?
But how do you propose to avoid nation-building? How do we know when we’ve “destroyed ISIS,” will their “state” sign a formal surrender like Germany and Japan did?
Iraq seemed pretty well pacified by the time we withdrew, and a few years later ISIS emerged. If we send in ground troops and pacify the whole region again, and then leave a year or two or five later, what’s to prevent ISIS from rising up again like a hydra the minute we leave? So far they have no lack of fresh recruits willing to die for the cause, and they seem to have a lot more patience than we do.
Good catch. He obviously meant there were almost 1,300 tons of bombs dropped daily, and in total, five tons dropped for every one of the 20,000 NVA soldiers–100,000 tons dropped in total. Good for you (very good for you) for reading closely and doing the math.
I’m not sure why he said that, but suspect the comment had less to do with reality and more to do with appeasing US public opinion and shaming the Iraqis into more vigorous action. We’re being taunted by the Iranians as having “no will to fight,” too. I suspect that the way it looks to many in the region is closer to the way Iranians are putting it, given that we’re the ones, not them, who withdrew from Iraq and given our haphazard-to-nugatory use of air power.
There’s no accurate count yet of the number of Iraqis who fought to the death (and there may never be), and no way to know how reliable the witness accounts are, but no one seems to deny this:
It doesn’t sound from that as if like they lacked the will to fight, it sounds as if they were killed. But I couldn’t possibly know, I wasn’t there. Eyewitness reports right now will be close to worthless, as will anything any politician says. No one has any motivation to say, “We lost because we didn’t put up a fight,” and no commander could, would, or should say that under any circumstances, ever, so we may as well just discount that as background noise.
Joseph Stanko:
Let’s hold off for now on the idea of sending in ground troops and pacifying the region, and just focus on one aspect of this: stanching the psychological, propaganda, and recruitment gains that result from every ISIS victory. Given their ideology, their ability to capture territory in what appears to be a miraculous way is its own advertisement. Demonstrating that they are not capable of pulling off the impossible–they are not able to survive intense aerial bombardment and keep advancing–would be a huge blow to their image and to their ability to recruit, as well as a huge boost to the morale of people on the ground who now see them as invincible.
“Pacifying the whole region” is probably beyond us. The goal needs to be more limited: Deliver a blow to ISIS sufficient that it no longer looks as if nothing can stop them. That alone would probably slow the flow of recruits. Their success is snowballing, because with every victory, their own story about who they are appears to be confirmed–they look more and more like a divinely-ordained Caliphate that has God on its side, as opposed to a very fallible and psychopathic armed gang.
Many of them are foreign fighters who are going there because ISIS has been so successful. Although no one can make any promises, it seems logical to me, given ISIS ideology, that a sufficiently catastrophic defeat would slow or even stop the influx of foreign fighters.
It is absolutely true that there’s no guarantee of success and that “success,” at this point, has to be defined in terms that won’t sound appealing to Americans. We’re not going to bring liberal, parliamentary democracy to this region. Success is containing this Caliphate before it spreads any further and acquires even more lethal weapons. Ideally, it is destroying it completely, and yes, something else could rise up and take its place, but it would have to rebuild itself, and there would be widespread demoralization. Many would be disabused of the idea that it’s possible for a bunch of psychopathic kids with cellphones, stolen weapons, and the Koran to take on a modern military and win–which they should be, because it isn’t.
The point is that nation-building is a toxic idea right now. And ISIS controls territory, using conventional forces. Destroy the conventional forces, kill the leadership, and make ISIS a laughingstock. This is about willpower, not patience – break their will to resist.
The Nazis found it a lot easier to recruit in 1939 than in 1944. Fresh recruits are going to think twice if ISIS is an express elevator to hell courtesy of the US military and the Peshmerga.
Claire – This is all a jumbled up mess in several parts, but I’ve not the time to write a short, well-organized response.
Yes, the Graeme Wood article made a splash when it came out in late Feb/March. Yup, ISIS is barbaric. GWB and Cheney were right: it’s ‘The Long War’ and we’re up against it. But there’s plenty we can and should do before sending more Sergeants off to die or lose limbs.
First, I don’t mean to sound blasé, but millenarian Islam has been around a long time. We just decided to take it seriously and act as though it’s uniquely our problem to solve. Do I want the ugly consequences you detail as certainties and I’d call potentialities? Of course not, but that’s not the same as being able to stop them.
Where I think you are most out of touch is in saying / implying we somehow MUST bear any burden and right this wrong. That was so last decade. We’re well over $18 Trillion in debt and it’s growing at about $1 million a minute. Every minute, every day, all year. And the next year. And on and on and on.
–more–
And that’s after significantly cutting defense spending since sequestration began in 2011. Why exactly is it that our NATO allies get to unilaterally disarm, never meet their NATO defense spending promises, but we must always trash our children’s future so our friends can live well now? We can’t keep pretending that printing money is the same as paying our way. We can’t keep foisting on future generations our inability to live within our means. If debt and deficits actually worked as a long term strategy, we’d be speaking Latin right now.
If the consequences you tally are so pressing and dire, why are we the only ones that seem to care? Why are we the only ones being urged to get in there and stop it? Forgive me, it’s someone else’s turn and I don’t much care who.
Remember the Iran – Iraq war? If Shia and Sunni get back at their real ambition—wiping out the other—what’s the problem for the US? No, we don’t relish the bloodshed. But where is it written that our kids have to stop fanatics from killing themselves by dying for them? That was last decade, not this one.
We should focus on encouraging Iran and ISIS to kill each other for as long as possible. Hopefully, decades. Why intervene and lessen the fighting when our enemies are busy killing one another? Sorry if that’s too harsh sounding. That’s what happens when you double the national debt, not once but TWICE, in just 14 years.
If there’s a threat to us, maybe—just maybe—we’ll have to actually secure our borders. How about that instead of sending troops overseas? It’s immoral to ask our kids to die in Iraq so that Democrats can continue letting illegals boost their electoral rolls through our unsecure, porous borders, while GOP dandies lie about building a fence.
The President canceled the missile defense system designed precisely to thwart Iranian ambitions. We have to live with the consequences of the Presidents we elect. If as a matter of policy the Commander-in-Chief shrugged at Iran’s threat to us and our allies, why do you think getting US soldiers killed instead of Iraqis will solve the fundamental problem our leadership has created? I don’t think it will and it’s immoral to let more great middle class Americans get killed or disfigured because of the stupidity of well-educated, pampered elites like Barry Obama.
Instead, let’s have future leaders get serious about the mess Obama created before we send soldiers into harm’s way in Iraq. I don’t believe ISIS is going to overrun the planet anytime soon . . . it seems we’re the only ones worrying about it enough to expend any ‘hard’ power . . . let’s use our famed ‘soft power’ and see if that doesn’t suffice. No, it won’t. Too bad. We can keep America secure if we want to. But our leaders would rather let middle class kids die so that they can keep playing political games which aggrandize themselves. It’s sickening.