{"id":8670,"date":"2015-05-31T08:07:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T13:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8670"},"modified":"2015-05-31T08:07:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T13:07:50","slug":"superpower-in-distress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8670","title":{"rendered":"Superpower in Distress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Superpower in Distress<\/a><\/h3>\n

Think of this as a little imperial folly update — and here’s the backstory.\u00a0 In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein\u2019s military, the U.S. sunk about\u00a0$25 billion<\/a>\u00a0into \u201cstanding up\u201d a new Iraqi army.\u00a0 By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least\u00a050,000 \u201cghost soldiers<\/a>,\u201d was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington.\u00a0 When\u00a0relatively small numbers<\/a>\u00a0of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning\u00a0four cities<\/a>\u00a0— including Mosul, the country\u2019s second largest — and\u00a0leaving behind<\/a>\u00a0enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles.\u00a0 In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight.<\/p>\n

In response, the Obama administration\u00a0dispatched<\/a>\u00a0thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in\u00a0piles of new weaponry<\/a>\u00a0to re-equip the Iraqi army.\u00a0 It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to\u00a0destroy<\/a>, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry.\u00a0 Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army.\u00a0 Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again.\u00a0 Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province.\u00a0 Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained\u00a0Golden Division<\/a>, broke and fled, leaving behind — you\u2019ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear — yet\u00a0another huge cache<\/a>\u00a0of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Superpower in Distress Think of this as a little imperial folly update — and here’s the backstory.\u00a0 In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein\u2019s military, the U.S. sunk about\u00a0$25 billion\u00a0into \u201cstanding up\u201d a new Iraqi army.\u00a0 By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least\u00a050,000 \u201cghost soldiers,\u201d was only standing in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5911,259,3520,442,1239,447,827,834,3159],"class_list":["post-8670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-distress","tag-empire","tag-imperialism","tag-iraq","tag-is","tag-islamic-state","tag-united-states","tag-us","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8671,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8670\/revisions\/8671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}