Buyer's Remorse by Bill Press

Author:Bill Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

The Bad War: The Sequel

It was June 10, 2014. The war in Iraq, which ended three years earlier, was largely forgotten, when suddenly news broke that ISIS, a terrorist organization most Americans had never heard of, had seized control of Mosul. And soon American forces were deployed in yet another undeclared war in Iraq, which could last as long as the first one.48

Part of the confusion over ISIS was that it was so new, nobody knew what to call it. They originally called themselves the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, but later changed their name to the Islamic State. The Obama administration, for whatever reason, insisted on calling them ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Take your pick. Like most journalists, I prefer ISIS.

Actually, nobody should have been surprised by the emergence of ISIS, certainly not U.S. intelligence agencies with their vast surveillance apparatus. The group was formed in 2006, out of the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq. It soon built a large following among Sunni tribal leaders resentful of the exclusive Shia government put together by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. With the goal of creating a caliphate in Iraq and Syria under Sharia law, ISIS started acquiring territory and, by 2014, controlled most of western Syria and northern Iraq.49

Yet when ISIS took over Fallujah in January 2014, followed by Mosul and the Mosul dam, the Obama administration seemed to be caught asleep at the switch once again. (Which makes you wonder just who the NSA spends all day spying on.) President Obama, in fact, seemed to dismiss the threat of ISIS in an earlier interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick. Asked directly about terrorist groups still operating in Iraq, Obama dismissed the idea that any of them were as big a threat as al Qaeda: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”50

By June, nobody was calling ISIS a “JV team” anymore, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was accusing the administration of being caught off guard: “I mean, they crossed the border into Iraq before we even knew it happened. This is a group of people who are extraordinarily dangerous, and they’ll kill with abandon.” Indeed, ISIS was now identified as an even more serious threat than al Qaeda, because it had funding, territory, and heavy weapons, most of them American-made arms acquired from the Iraqi military when, in their first clash with ISIS, they dropped their weapons and fled.51

Recognizing the danger posed by ISIS was one thing. Knowing what to do about it was another. Which led to another agonizing, zigzagging decision-making process by President Obama. He said the goal of the United States was clear: “to degrade and destroy ISIS.” But, for months, he never set forth any plan for achieving that goal. Instead, it was a series of stops and starts. He sent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.