Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s ISIS Gaffe is Even Worse Than You Think

Most people take Memorial Day weekend as a time for beaches and family barbecues. US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spent it being publicly, frighteningly wrong about a key front in America's war against ISIS. 

Carter went on CNN's State of the Union Sunday morning to talk about the state of the war in Iraq. In the interview, Carter said Iraqi soldiers had suffered a major defeat recently because they weren't willing “to fight [ISIS] and defend themselves.”

Carter is wrong: that's just not what happened in Ramadi. But worse, his statement is also counterproductive: for the US-led campaign against ISIS to work, the United States needs to bolster the Iraqi military — not tear it down publicly.

What Carter got wrong

Carter's comments were specifically about Ramadi, the provincial capital of Iraq's western Anbar, which ISIS conquered in mid-May. This was ISIS's biggest victory in almost a year, and Carter blamed it on something that sounds a lot like Iraqi cowardice.

“What apparently happened [in Ramadi] is that the Iraqi forces showed no will to fight,” the secretary said. “They were not outnumbered: in fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. And yet they failed to fight.”

The problem with this narrative is that it is totally wrong. Iraqi forces didn't turn tail in the face of a weaker ISIS force: they retreated after an 18-month siege by ISIS and virtually no reinforcements from Baghdad. They had a hell of a lot of “will to fight,” but couldn't hold out long enough.

Anbar province is an ISIS stronghold: the mostly Sunni province had never been a priority for Iraq's Shia-dominated government, and ISIS took full advantage of Baghdad's neglect in its decision to target Ramadi. ISIS's siege of the city began around December 2013, well before ISIS came to international attention by sweeping northern Iraq in June 2014.

For the past 16 months “the city's overstretched collection of Iraqi army, police, and Sunni tribal militia forces have fought a brutal, nonstop battle with little reinforcement,” Michael Knights, the Lafer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes. And yet, according to Knights, “the Iraqi security forces (ISF) maintained the upper hand in Ramadi until recently.”

How ISIS really took Ramadi

So what changed?

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ISIS devoted massive resources to the siege, while most of the Iraqi army's resources were directed elsewhere in the country. While Carter is right that the ISIS forces in the mid-May attack were probably outnumbered, that's really misleading.  If you tally up all of the ISIS forces devoted to Ramadi in the past nine months, the Iraqis had faced numbers about “six or seven times bigger than they were,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, estimated in a phone conversation. “They actually last longer than one might expect given the forces they were up against.”

ISIS only took the city after what Gartenstein-Ross describes as a “brilliant series of maneuvers”: a complicated offensive involving a massive number of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices that blew up “entire city blocks,” according to a US official quoted by the Wall Street Journal. Some of this happened under the cover of a sandstorm, making US air support for the beleaguered Iraqis difficult.

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