Why Iraq will continue to fall --- no matter what the West does

WASHINGTON -- Sadly enough, the talk in the administration and in the media over the Memorial Day weekend -- even as the traditional concert was grandly celebrated on the Capitol's West Lawn -- was on how we were losing the Iraq War.

If anyone wasn't shocked by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's unmincing words on Sunday that Iraqi forces showed "no will to fight," as the Islamic State rolled ever farther across the Sunni belly of Iraq, that person did not say it. Indeed, there was a kind of mass inhaling of breath.

Speaking Sunday on CNN, Carter strongly asserted that the United States can provide training and equipment to Iraq's military, as it is doing, but it cannot teach them how to want to fight.

"Airstrikes are effective," he said, "but neither they, nor really anything we do, can substitute for the Iraqi forces' will to fight. They're the ones who have to beat ISIL and then keep them beaten."

Carter was particularly critical of the terrorists' taking of the Sunni town of Ramadi, which lies exactly on the road from Baghdad to Jordan, when huge numbers of Iraqi forces decided to flee from ISIL, leaving behind valuable American weaponry.

Now, we could end it right there, with nods and sighs and heads shaking, and leave the question of "Why don't the Iraqi troops fight?" out there on the horizon like an eternally unanswerable question. But I don't think it's unanswerable, and I think so less today than 12 years ago.

In fact, I found one of the most revealing analyses of the Iraqi fighting capacities last week on the front page of The Washington Times. The analysis is so simple and so right, one can only wonder at how the White House and Pentagon leadership could have missed it for so long.

The story is mostly an interview with former Army Staff Sgt. Matt Pelak, who had helped train some of the first post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi forces in 2004. The officer told the paper "that the nation's soldiers are likelier to lay down their weapons and flee in the face of a fight because the force is largely devoid of leadership and operating under a fractured government."

Or: Iraqi forces believe they have nothing to fight for.

"It's like a car without a steering wheel," Pelak went on. "We built this car, put an engine in it, it works, it's great, but it's going to go wherever it wants. We can't steer it. I think that's what we're seeing now. I think it's a governance issue. How can you have a unified military in a country without a unified government?"

Reading this, I thought to myself, "Finally, someone has 'got' it!" Yet, this argument is not really new. In some ways, Pelak's explanation is simply a repetition of the arguments in Vietnam about that war. We correspondents, along with the diplomats and military, disputed ceaselessly: Was Vietnam a Communist-inspired rebellion that we must nip in the bud, or was it one of the post-World War II wars against the European colonialism of the past?

In truth, it is all quite simple. Men and women will not fight FOR foreign invaders against even the countrymen they don't particularly like. We would not, and we did not! In fact, we waged a bitter war in the 1770s against the British overlords who must have seemed to us much as we seem today to the Iraqis and the Afghanis -- and certainly the way we seemed to the Vietnamese.

There is a particularly obnoxious look to mercenaries, no matter where they are, when they are perceived as the people fighting against you, and with no reason to be there.

"We trained them in how to do their job," Pelak, who is now in the National Guard, continued. "They learned to fire their weapon, but without leadership ... that's all for naught. ... The majority of folks were just going through the motions and happy to be getting a paycheck. We didn't feel overly confident about their abilities when they were done with the training cycle.

"You see it in their eyes, when you're trying to train some Iraqi military folks, there's no fire. They're just sort of very often confused or lost."

Thoughts like these can evoke various responses. They could, for instance, cause the military to understand -- really understand -- the hearts and minds of other peoples; or they could just cause them to do more of the same: Send more weapons, more advisers, more of a naturally hated foreign presence.

Repeat, after me: MAYBE THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO FIGHT FOR.

Previously:
• 05/06/15: For Europe, generosity to turn into nightmare?
• 04/29/15: Both sides must work to end our season of killing
• 04/01/15: Our next president should be a homebody
• 03/04/15: Japan's sun poised to rise on world stage
• 01/21/15: Rumors of a new Cold War have real roots in history
• 01/21/15: It's time to be practical about multiculturalism
• 01/07/15: Tension mounts against Muslim immigration in the West

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Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years.