Hopes hinge on perilous and long-awaited Mosul assault

The early stages of the campaign to liberate Mosul are revealing exactly why it took so long to seize the city from the bloody grip of ISIS.

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“The delay in liberating Mosul was almost entirely a function of the Obama administration’s ‘light footprint’ approach to the conflict,” said John Hannah, senior counselor at Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. “His strategy — the Obama Doctrine, if you will — is premised on having local partners do the bulk of the fighting, with the U.S. supporting from behind in very small numbers. The problem in Iraq, of course, was that the local partner that we’re depending on, the Iraqi Security Forces, largely collapsed in 2014 in the face of the Islamic State’s invasion.”

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