Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian
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The fall of Ramadi has not just exposed the weakness of Barack Obama’s nine-month war against the Islamic State. It has also exposed his administration to accusations of a growing credibility gap between optimistic White House pronouncements and the grim realities on the ground.
Iraq veterans, thinktank analysts and former US officials have begun drawing comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon during the darkest days of the Iraq occupation. Then as now, some suspect the US is sacrificing a truthful description of the war to avoid pressure to escalate.
“Perhaps reality has smacked the administration over the head with a two-by-four in recent days,” said retired army colonel Peter Mansoor, a multi-tour Iraq veteran who served as executive officer to general David Petraeus during the 2007-08 Iraq surge.
The long-simmering critique has boiled over after Ramadi fell to Isis fighters, a circumstance administration officials downplayed before and after the capital of Anbar province was overrun earlier this month. Administration pronouncements on Ramadi now openly contradict assurances issued just days earlier.
On Saturday, defense secretary Ashton Carter excoriated the Iraqi military for showing “no will to fight” Isis, after it abandoned Ramadi – a city it had previously held for a year.
Yet just days before, the senior US military officer, general Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had defended the Iraqi withdrawal as a strategic retreat to a more defensible position. “The [Iraqi Security Force] was not driven out of Ramadi, they drove out of Ramadi,” Dempsey told the Wall Street Journal on 20 May.
“The Iraqis, with coalition support, are making sound progress,” Marine brigadier general Thomas Weidley, the chief of staff of the US military command prosecuting the war, told Pentagon reporters on 15 May. Weidley conceded that Isis had for days assaulted the city, but pointed to “165 air strikes” which had been launched in the past month to help government forces keep Ramadi.Five days before that, as Isis fighters carried out a string of assassinations and bomb attacks that heralded their capture of the city, senior US officials insisted that their coalition – not the insurgents – still held the momentum.
“We firmly believe Daesh is on the defensive throughout Iraq and Syria, attempting to hold previous gains, while conducting small-scale, localized harassing attacks, occasional complex or high-profile attacks, in order to feed their information and propaganda apparatus,” Weidley said, using a dismissive Arabic acronym for Isis.
Asked about Isis hoisting its flag in Ramadi, Weidley suggested that Isis was merely “taking photos and documenting small-term gains and then using it for propaganda purposes”.
By 26 May, more than a week after Ramadi fell, a Central Command press release boasting of a robust coalition commitment to defeating Isis referred vaguely to “recent tactical-level setbacks”.
In the weeks before Ramadi fell, Pentagon officials dismissed fighting in the surrounding, mainly Sunni province of Anbar as a sideshow.
On 14 April, Dempsey said Ramadi – the capital of Anbar provice, which sits between Isis strongholds in Syria and the Iraqi capital of Baghdad – was “not symbolic in any way”, calling the oil refinery at Baiji “a more strategic target”. Baiji is about 180km south of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which US warplanners have publicly prioritized over Ramadi since autumn – an emphasis they have now reversed.
“Anyone who was looking at the situation could tell that the loss of Ramadi would be hugely significant,” Mansoor said.
Mansoor, now a history professor at the Ohio State University, bemoaned “happy talk that the strategy is working and all they need to do is adjust at the margins”, saying it “could create a credibility gap going forward if they don’t become more forthright”.
Beyond Ramadi, questionable administration statements about Iraq and Isis have accumulated for months.
In April, the Pentagon released a map that seemed to show Isis losing its hold on territory throughout Iraq by more than 25%. Despite the administration’s daily air strikes and its deployment of 3,000 “noncombat” military forces back to Iraq, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, said on 20 May that Obama has “ended two wars responsibly” – while both wars continue.
The deployment of those forces, many of them elite troops that the administration prefers to call “advisers” to the Iraqi military, has stretched the White House assurance against “boots on the ground” to the breaking point. So has the on-the-ground contributions to the war made by Shia militias and Iranian forces, which took the city of Tikrit back from Isis even as senior US generalsdenied they were present.
Even the Pentagon’s website for the war prefers the relatively antiseptic term “Targeted Operations Against [Isis] Terrorists”. Meanwhile, a campaign that Obama unilaterally launched in August with the limited goal of preventing a “humanitarian catastrophe” has sprawled into daily strikes in two countries. The US military acknowledges causing only two civilian casualties despite launching more than 3,000 such air strikes.
Jack Keane, the former army vice chief of staff and an architect of the surge, told a Senate panel on Thursday that the specter of the Rumsfeld Pentagon, which for years insisted the Iraq occupation faced merely minor difficulties, had returned.
“I hear a disturbing and frightening echo of the summer of 2006 when administration senior government – when a different administration, senior government officials and military senior generals came before this committee and in the face of compelling evidence that our strategy in Iraq was failing, these officials looked at you and defended that strategy and told you that overall the strategy was succeeding,” Keane testified.
From the White House, the administration has taken the view that the war would always be “long and difficult”, as deputy press secretary Eric Schultz said on 18 May, and the fall of Ramadi is a “setback” that does not herald broader flaws in US strategy. “We’ve had other periods of setback too that have been followed shortly by important progress,” press secretary Josh Earnest said on 19 May.
Taking a broader view, Obama last week rebuffed the idea that he “overlearned the mistake of Iraq”, suggesting that the limits he has placed on the US military commitment to Iraq reflect and hedge against Iraqi sectarianism that outside pressure cannot resolve.
“If the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them,” Obama told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, adding: “No, I don’t think we’re losing.”
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