America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (56 page)

The newest claimant to the title wasted no time in asserting principal ownership, even if it look a while for observers to catch on. In July 2013, when ISIS engineered a spectacular jailbreak that freed hundreds of militants locked up in Iraqi prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji,
The New York Times
credited the action to “Al Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate.”
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Nominally accurate, the characterization missed the point that the affiliate was in the process of superseding the parent organization.
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In December, ISIS seized Fallujah, for Americans a city retaining deep resonance as the site of fierce battles that claimed the lives of over a hundred GIs during the previous Gulf War. With this success, ISIS emerged from Al Qaeda’s shadows. Early the following month, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the organization’s supreme leader, declared the founding of a new caliphate and pronounced himself caliph. ISIS designated the territory over which it presided in Iraq and Syria the Islamic State. AQI was last night’s bad dream; Islamic State was tomorrow’s nightmare.

Asked to comment on these developments, Secretary of State Kerry emphasized that the United States had no intention of getting dragged back in militarily. “This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis,” he insisted.
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For his part, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Obama’s third appointee to that post, tried valiantly to put the best face on things. Yes, Iraq was going through a “difficult time.” Yet even while admitting that Iraq’s new army might not be perfect, Hagel believed that it had “done pretty well.” The danger was real, but “Iraq is going to handle it. And we’re going to continue to help them and support them.”
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At this point, “help and support” meant “arm and equip.” Going back to 2005, the United States had already sold Iraq some $14 billion in weapons and related military materiel. The Pentagon now promised even more, to include M1A1 Abrams tanks, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and missiles of various types.
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Worse was still to come, however. In June, a force of fewer than a thousand ISIS fighters captured Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, along with Tikrit, hometown of Saddam Hussein. Iraqi defenders—two whole divisions—offered alarmingly little resistance.
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According to press reports, soldiers in large numbers abandoned their posts, shed their uniforms, and simply fled, setting off a stampede of refugees. Baghdad itself now seemed vulnerable.
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In Washington, something akin to panic set in. Senator John McCain described the situation in Iraq as “the greatest threat since the Cold War,” notwithstanding that ISIS mustered a grand total of perhaps ten thousand fighters.
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“Iraq is burning, and the United States of America is watching,” military analyst Frederick Kagan fumed. Further inaction, he predicted, “would do far more damage to America than our retreat from Vietnam in 1975.”
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Max Boot spelled out the implications of this dire situation:

ISIS is well on its way to carving out a fundamentalist caliphate that stretches from Aleppo in northern Syria to Mosul in northern Iraq. The post–World War I borders of the Middle East seem to be unraveling. Syria is being split into two entities, one controlled by Sunni Islamists, the other by Hezbollah….Iraq is being split into three….The only thing that remains to be determined is whether Shiite or Sunni extremists will control the capital—the new battle for Baghdad, which has already begun, is likely to be even bloodier than the previous installment.
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All the critics agreed in placing the problem at Obama’s feet. When it came to Iraq, he had not cared enough or done enough. None of the critics gave more than passing attention to assessing the consequences of what the United States had already done, not only in Iraq but elsewhere in the region, over the previous several decades. Washington suffered from the inverse of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Short-term memory going back a week or ten days was perfectly intact; everything else was gone.

The Obama administration itself shared this disinclination to examine the past, preferring to treat ISIS as sui generis. Without admitting error, it responded to the crisis much as its critics were demanding. So, for example, on June 15, Kagan called for “immediately sending air support; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets; air transportation; Special Operations forces; training teams; and more military equipment.”
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Four days later, President Obama announced that he was repositioning U.S. air and naval assets in anticipation of “targeted and precise military action”; had “significantly increased our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets”; was dispatching U.S. troops to “train, advise, and support Iraqi security forces”; and was pressing Congress to approve further transfers of military equipment to Iraq.
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Without saying so, the president also ordered special operations forces into action. The imperatives of partisanship concealed what was, in fact, a broad, if unacknowledged, consensus.

Within days, armed U.S. aircraft, both manned and unmanned, were conducting reconnaissance flights over Iraq.
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Soon thereafter, U.S. troops arrived to ensure the security of Baghdad International Airport.
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On August 7, citing the plight of the Yazidi religious sect that ISIS was threatening to exterminate, President Obama announced the beginning of a U.S. air campaign against the Islamic State, even as he assured Americans that “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.”
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Air strikes began the next day; by any commonly understood definition of the term, the United States was once more at war in Iraq.

Although the siege of the Yazidis was lifted within days, air operations continued, albeit at a modest tempo. Air force and navy jets, the latter flying from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS
George H. W. Bush,
conducted an average of just five strike missions a day against ISIS ground forces.
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While the JCS director of operations, army Lieutenant General William Mayville, claimed that these strikes had “temporarily disrupted” the enemy offensive, he conceded that such a meager level of effort was unlikely to make any lasting impact on overall ISIS capabilities. “I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained or that we are somehow breaking the momentum of the threat,” he emphasized.
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So the Obama administration revised and expanded the campaign’s objectives. On September 9, the president went back on national television to announce his intention to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State “through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.”
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In practical terms, that meant liberating ISIS-occupied cities and regaining control of Iraq’s porous borders. Both tasks promised to be challenging. Obama’s war-that-was-not-a-war was going to entail major exertions, and it was going to take time. In the American military lexicon,
mission creep
was a term of opprobrium, redolent with connotations similar to Vietnam’s “gradual escalation.” It suggested action without clearly defined purpose. When it came to ISIS, the mission was undeniably creeping.
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That same month, at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, General Lloyd Austin convened a conference of several dozen nations that in one way or another had signaled a willingness to lend a hand against the Islamic State. President Obama had appointed another four-star officer, General John Allen, former CENTCOM commander now retired, as his “Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.” Allen’s job was to reconcile the various interests and divergent capabilities of coalition members; Austin’s was to orchestrate the ongoing military campaign.

In October, that campaign acquired a name, Operation Inherent Resolve. As a call to arms, it was notably muted.

To fulfill President Obama’s charge, Austin designed a plan with two distinct dimensions. From the air, where the coalition enjoyed near-impunity, forces under his command would subject ISIS to continuous bombing, not only in Iraq but also in Syria.
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On the ground, American and other Western advisers would “regenerate and restructure,” while also attempting to motivate, Iraqi ground forces. Ultimately, Austin assumed, the war’s outcome was going to turn on whether or not Iraqis themselves decided that their country was worth defending.
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During the fall of 2014, the air effort ramped up. Between August and December, the monthly tally of weapons actually released increased ninefold.
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Yet in terms of strike sorties per day, the overall intensity lagged well behind previous bombing campaigns, even lesser episodes such as Bosnia in 1995 and Libya in 2011.
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One observer derided the bombing as “military tokenism.”
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Even as Austin pronounced himself satisfied with the progress being made, he acknowledged that ISIS was adjusting its tactics so as to limit the effectiveness of coalition air attacks.
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The fact was that ISIS offered only so many targets worth the price of a PGM. Bombing alone was not going to suffice.

Simultaneously, coalition efforts to train Iraqi security forces picked up momentum, at least as measured by energy expended. In June, President Obama had ordered a first tranche of several hundred trainers to Iraq. The numbers increased incrementally such that by the end of 2014 there were three thousand U.S. military personnel in country. Upon their arrival, the Americans discovered that the Iraqi army so laboriously created during the years of U.S. occupation had all but vanished. Rebuilding meant starting from the ground up.
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In terms of operational goals once that rebuilding was underway, regaining control of Mosul ranked as a top CENTCOM priority. General Martin Dempsey, the JCS chairman, had already identified the fight for Mosul as likely to be “the decisive battle in the ground campaign.”
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Austin shared that view. By January, the normally reticent CENTCOM commander was willing to go public with a progress report and a timetable. Things were looking up. Inherent Resolve had already killed an estimated six thousand ISIS fighters, Austin said. ISIS was “beginning to experience a manpower issue.” An Iraqi-led counteroffensive to retake Mosul was on track to occur in the spring or summer of 2015.
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Testifying before Congress in March of that year, Austin was even more upbeat. As a result of the battering it had sustained from the air, ISIS could no longer “seize and hold new territory,” he indicated. The enemy had assumed “a defensive crouch” and was “losing this fight.” Ensuring its complete defeat held the key to moving the entire “region in the direction of increased stability and security”—a goal routinely enunciated by CENTCOM commanders over the previous several decades.
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Austin’s optimism proved misplaced. ISIS demonstrated a remarkable ability not only to replenish its losses but actually to increase its overall strength. By June 2015, with a senior U.S. official now claiming that air operations had killed fully ten thousand ISIS fighters—a number equal to the supposed size of the entire force one year prior—estimates suggested that ISIS now had somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand men under arms.
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ISIS was also demonstrating an impressive capacity to recruit. While most fighters came from the Middle East and North Africa, others arrived from more remote corners of the Islamic world such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia, the southern Philippines, and, of course, Bosnia and Kosovo. Disturbing numbers came from within the West itself, to include hundreds from European countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, along with dozens of Australians, Canadians, and even Americans. The figures were imprecise, but the phenomenon itself was troubling.
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Certainly, there existed no reason to believe that U.S.-led military action was depleting the enemy’s ranks. If anything, the opposite was true.

In the late spring of 2015, as if to rebut General Austin’s positive assessment, ISIS launched another major offensive. In the previous months, Iraqi forces had regained some lost territory, for example retaking Tikrit. The Peshmerga, the self-defense forces of Iraqi Kurdistan fighting their own distinct war against ISIS, had held their own.
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Decapitation efforts—including a raid into Syria by U.S. special operations forces that killed a mid-level ISIS functionary—achieved occasional successes.
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And, of course, the air war continued. With all the regularity of hourly shuttle flights between LaGuardia and Washington National, coalition aircraft traversed Iraqi and Syrian airspace, releasing roughly two thousand bombs and missiles per month.
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On May 15, Marine Brigadier General Thomas D. Weidley, speaking from Kuwait, went so far as to assure the Pentagon press corps that ISIS was losing “across Iraq and Syria.” “They remain on the defensive,” he said, adding that “the coalition strategy…is on track.”
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