IRAQ INTELLIGENCE FAILURE 275things will go south. If the risks or consequences of not acting outweigh
the risks of acting in an imperfect situation, you do the best you can, but
you proceed. In the end, since I was willing to risk my company’s future in
order to support the US security mission in Iraq, the government was too.
Babylon Inc. was not tied to the military or US government going in,
and it would not be so encumbered going out. But our collaboration pro-
vided lots of bang for the buck. Both literally and figuratively.
By now it is no doubt aggravatingly clear that I cannot get into much
detail, but through Babylon’s collaboration I was returning the favor of
life-saving benefits I’d received in the past, by saving the lives of other
Americans (and Iraqis), whether they realized it or not. (And for the most
part, they did not.) I was paying it forward in a meaningful and anonymous
way, and it felt good. I ran Babylon Inc. based on my own unique experi-
ence, accomplishing things inside Iraq the US government could not pos-
sibly do on their own.
As the United States wound down its military operations in Iraq in late
2011, my government contacts informed me they no longer required my
company’s services in Iraq. My arguments—and those of several inside the
government—fell on deaf ears. The bad guys were not going away. My
business in Iraq continued as usual. President Obama had made good on
his promise to get the United States out of Iraq, consequences be damned.
Fast-forward to June 2014. ISIS appeared “out of nowhere” and took over
Mosul.
They didn’t really appear out of nowhere. After American troops left
Iraq, a crippled but not yet defeated AQI continued to rebuild, as predicted,
and eventually morphed into what is now known as ISIS or Daesh. By early
2014, ISIS had taken over Ramadi and Fallujah, after which the terror
group formally split from al-Qaeda Central (UBL’s old shop). By mid-June,
Mosul was under ISIS control. A handful of scraggly, bearded ISIS terrorists
spooked thousands of Iraqi troops, who dropped their American-provided
weapons before retreating. President Obama, whose White House had been
ignoring Iraq (and CIA warnings about Iraq), said the intelligence commu-
nity had missed warning signs about the rise of ISIS.^1