The emerging, sorry truths about our history with ISIS
When the first savage hordes of the Islamic State came rolling out of Syria in stolen American trucks across the unrelieved sands of northern Iraq in 2013, it seemed to be an image of Mesopotamian hell on Detroit wheels.
Who WERE these people? Where had they been hiding? Indeed, where COULD hundreds of ominously black-clad men - faces covered, American guns also stolen - secret themselves in a world of cameras, drones, satellites, social media and spies everywhere?
But that historic event was no mirage. We know now that the Islamic State, its most recent name after ISIS and ISIL, was and is composed of young men from the Syrian revolution, displaced Chechen fighters, restless boys and girls from all over the world and, on the warrior-in-chief level, the most brutal and bitter Iraqi officers and intelligence minds of Saddam Hussein, whom we threw out.
Most of us had thought at the time that we did not know who and what they were. Now, there is more information revealing that many in our military and diplomatic corps actually DID know of the brutal and dangerous revolutionary sect that was forming inside Syria.
As the terrorists rode so "gaily" across the northern reaches between prospering Kurdistan and what was historically Mesopotamia, the cruel men in those buses --"borrowed," like their guns, artillery and specialized weapons, from an Iraqi army reluctant to fight - could have easily been bombed out of existence. They were alone on those roads, prisoners of the sands.
But for reasons we can still only guess at, American generals and ambassadors chose not to confront them where it would have been so easy.
I had heard, for instance, from different American diplomats that some in their ranks, in particular the highly respected Ambassador Brett H. McGurk, had warned openly about the Islamic State even while it was only in the process of formation - of its conception of itself as a state, of its use of oil money and of its mammoth ambitions to take over whole parts of the Middle East.
Ambassador McGurk, whose current position was deputy special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, had even testified before the House Armed Services Committee as early as November 2013 about the emerging threat of the Islamic State. Now, two recent newspaper reports begin to complete the story:
- The New York Times quoted a defense intelligence analyst last week saying that military officials were "improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments" to give top officials, including President Obama, a more optimistic picture of American efforts against the Islamic State. In July, retired Gen. John Allen went so far as to say that "ISIS is losing," although Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was more pessimistic, saying, "It's going to take some time."
- The same week, The Washington Post made public a 114-page Iraqi parliamentary report on the fall of the city of Mosul and on "why security forces in northern Iraq's largest city collapsed so rapidly as militants attacked in June 2014."
The still-secret report, according to the Post, is devastating: "There was ample warning (of the attack on Mosul). The Islamic State began destroying bridges and blocking supply routes to the city six months before the attack. ... Intelligence services provided the coordinates of Islamic State bases, and an airstrike could have stopped the attack, the report said. But 'that strike never happened.'"
To add to the chaotic scene, the Iraqi commander stayed on vacation until hours before the Mosul attack, mirroring the immorality and dysfunction of the entire Iraqi army in which, to name only one problem, officers pocketed the salaries of absent soldiers. The U.S. paid an estimated $25 billion to train and equip that army.
One wonders when our military and diplomatic "strategists" will ever come to the conclusion that we just don't know how to do these wars well, quite outside of the morality of them? Now, many of those on the right are talking about a war with Iran as though it were just another game show.
Perhaps the only sensible words come from Anthony H. Cordesman, who really IS a strategist and is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"From Vietnam to the present, the resulting history of far too many U.S. military efforts has become a history of failed strategies defended by exaggerated claims of success," he wrote recently in a congressional statement. "This is now all too true of what have become 'failed state wars' in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. These are wars that we are not winning."
Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
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