The will to fight

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[/audioplayer]War is a contest of wills. Although determination alone does not guarantee final victory, its absence makes defeat all but inevitable.

Way back in the 1770s, Britain lost most of its north American colonies because rebellious Americans cared more about gaining their independence than George III and his ministers cared about preserving their empire. Today, if Isis fighters care more about creating their caliphate than Iraqis do about preserving their country, then Iraq may be doomed.

At Saratoga in 1777, a scratch force of American Continentals and militiamen defeated 7,000 regulars under the command of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne. It marked a major turning point in the American Revolutionary War. We may eventually see Isis’s recent seizure of Ramadi as an event of comparable significance.

As with the British at Saratoga, so with the Iraqi security forces in Ramadi: overall performance was abysmal. The Iraqi failure there elicited a harsh reaction from General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. ‘The ISF was not driven out of Ramadi,’ he told reporters. ‘They drove out of Ramadi.’ Rather than fighting, they fled. The secretary of defence Ashton Carter echoed that judgment, saying, ‘We have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight.’

Who is this ‘we’? Carter appears to believe that the United States owns a large block of shares in Iraq Inc., whose directors are therefore obliged to take into account what ‘we’ think. To be fair, he is merely reciting what US policymakers take for granted when contemplating the world at large. America’s entire miserable Mesopotamian misadventure has its basis in the conviction that ‘we’ possess the capacity to shape Iraq’s future, guiding its people, once liberated from the grip of tyrannical rule, toward some happy future.