The ISIS forces that routed the Iraqi army in Mosul are imbued with a unifying loyalty verging on the fanatic
The disintegration of the Iraqi Army in the face of the ISIS advance should not have taken us by surprise. Napoleon once weighted the fighting worth of his military by commenting: “The moral is to the physical as three is to one.”
If we are to understand events in Iraq, we need to look at the Arab culture, of which we show repeated ignorance.
“[The challenge] is not about equipment or about training, it’s all about loyalty”, I was told in 2007 by a police general who had just survived his third assassination attempt in as many weeks. “And you can’t touch this”.
Iraq is the creation of lines on a map imposed by the French and British after the First World War. The challenge ever since has been to bring together the varied interests and loyalties of a people divided by religion, ethnicity and locality. This is a people who are further subdivided by tribes, few of which are in any way constrained by lines on maps.
In the hierarchy of internal loyalties, the weakest loyalty is to institutions.
The Iraqi Army lacks the historical and cultural foundations that create selfless loyalty and sustain fighting spirit. The ISIS forces that routed the Iraqi army in Mosul are imbued with a unifying loyalty verging on the fanatic.
This weak moral component was throughout the Achilles’ heel of the mission to rebuild Iraq’s army.
Superior Western equipment and training was more evident than relevant.
