IRAQ INTELLIGENCE FAILURE 277ISIS and its designs on Mosul? Could we have prevented the ISIS takeover
of Mosul? If the US government had agreed to renew their collaboration
with Babylon Inc. in June 2014, would the ISIS occupation of Mosul have
lasted three years, or much less? Would the price paid by the United States
and Iraq to remove ISIS have been as high?
Once again, we will never know the answers to these important questions.
At the very least, we do know the situation could not have been any worse.
As discussed in the previous chapter, a single intelligence source is rarely
dispositive of the outcome in complex situations like Iraq. The Babylon Inc.
collaboration was only one of many pieces of the overall intelligence puzzle
on Iraq and AQI. But I believe it was an important piece.
Will anyone in the US government ever be held accountable for this
colossal blunder? If history is any indication, probably not.