Iraq was refusing to grant legal protection to U.S. military presence that could remain engaged with Iraqi forces. Over Christmas of 2011, as that deadline approached, I participated in conversations with the White House and State Department to try to preserve some sort of U.S. An agreement reached with Iraq during the Bush administration called for withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2011. forces in 2012-a departure that, as Leon Panetta’s deputy, I had argued against-along with Leon, Michele Flournoy, and the Joint Chiefs. Shortly after I left the Pentagon, Baghdadi’s forces shocked the world by seizing control of Fallujah.īaghdadi had taken advantage of the power vacuum and sectarian strife in Iraq that followed the departure of U.S. In the year I was out of government, between leaving the deputy secretary role and becoming Secretary of Defense, Baghdadi’s group had emerged, suddenly and unexpectedly, as a major threat. By the time I left in 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the barbaric head of a terror group called the Islamic State of Iraq, had no large base of territory or power, but was seeking to gain power and influence by merging with other extremist groups. All these had been priorities for me since 2009, when I had become Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, and continued as priorities when I became Deputy Secretary in 2011. When I departed that job in 2013, the Pentagon faced a daunting set of challenges: growing threats from Russia, a continuing war in Afghanistan, destabilizing regional actors such as North Korea and Iran, a strategic imperative to rebalance defense resources to the Asia-Pacific region, and more. Understanding the campaign requires going back to my time as Deputy Secretary of Defense. The story of how we got there is one of a little good fortune, a lot of skill and bravery on the part of young men and women from many nations-and, I think, some key decisions and recommendations that I and the department’s leadership made, and that President Obama consistently approved, to change a fight that had been going poorly. I had been looking at Q-West on campaign maps for a long time. In fact, the campaign plan that had unfolded on the battlefield was the same one I had presented to President Obama the previous December. Iraqi forces, with the support of a U.S.-led global coalition, had seized Q-West just as planned.
That plan had become reality, and I was there to see it in person. This very airfield was part of our plan of more than a year ago.” 2 That has been part of our plan for more than a year now. Standing next to Lieutenant General Steve Townsend, the commander Joe and I had selected to lead the fight, I told a small group of reporters: “I wanted to come here to Qayyarah West personally, particularly at this holiday time, to thank our troops who are out here at a pretty austere location that was in hands not long ago…. Ejecting ISIS and turning the airstrip into a logistics hub was essential to seizing Mosul, just 40 miles to the north.
Long road to hell america in iraq series#
We had laid out a series of military tasks, in Iraq and Syria, that would lead us to the liberation of ISIS’ strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria. A year before, General Joe Dunford and I had briefed the President on a plan to energize the counter-ISIS fight. Q-West, as it was known to the American military, was a talisman of progress on one of the defining issues of my time as secretary, the fight to defeat ISIS.
Long road to hell america in iraq Patch#
On December 11, 2016, just before my time as Secretary of Defense would end, I stepped off a C-130 transport plane onto a cold and dusty patch of northern Iraq that had been on my mind for more than a year: an Iraqi military airfield called Qayyarah West. A Lasting Defeat-The Campaign to Destroy ISIS 1
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