An Iraqi fighter from the popular mobilisation unit keeps position in al-Nibaie area, north-west of Baghdad, on May 27, 2015, during an operation aimed at cutting off Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Anbar province before a major offensive to retake the city of Ramadi.Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP / Getty Images
The headlong flight from Ramadi by thousands of panicked Iraqi troops reveals more than just the abject weakness of Baghdad's army.
It also exposes deep, perhaps crucial failings in President Barack Obama's strategic doctrine – that U.S. air power, coupled with others' boots on the ground, might resurrect a unified Iraq while defeating Islamic State, the nascent caliphate grounded in violent Sunni extremism.
"What happened in Ramadi was a failure of the Iraqi forces to fight," Mr. Obama's just-appointed defence secretary, Ash Carter, said in a searingly candid condemnation of Iraq's army on Sunday.
Cutting and running isn't new to Iraq's corrupt and mostly conscript army. In Mosul and Fallujah, in scores of smaller towns and now in Ramadi, the supposedly multiethnic army – intended to reflect the notion that Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds all remain committed to a single Iraq – has collapsed and fled in disarray despite being better equipped and far outnumbering their Islamic State enemies.
Iraqi forces were "not driven out of Ramadi," General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, scoffed. "They drove out of Ramadi." The exodus, captured on video, shows scores of overloaded HumVees crammed with troops, racing out of Ramadi leaving civilians behind. They also abandoned U.S.-provided tanks, weapons and munitions, leaving them to be used by the jihadis.
Ramadi starkly illustrates the reality that many, perhaps most, ordinary Iraqi conscripts are unwilling to fight and die for the concept of a unified country that doesn't, and may never again, exist, especially when fighting and losing can mean being massacred by Islamic State jihadis.
If there's a second battle of Ramadi, it seems likely to be fought on sectarian Shia-Sunni lines, just as the broader war inside Iraq is increasingly about dividing, not uniting a fractured nation.
For now, the Obama administration is standing by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite, and his promise to forge an inclusive country tolerant to all its different ethnicities and religions, with a matching army willing to defend all of it.
Defensively, Mr. Obama's spokesman Josh Earnest admitted that creating "a willing and capable local fighting force is going to take time." How much is unclear. The Iraqi army rebuilt during the U.S. occupation cost tens of billions of dollars and took years to create. It all but disappeared after Mr. Obama pulled all U.S. troops out in 2011, claiming they were "leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq."
Less than four years later, the so-called Islamic State controls more than a third of Iraq (albeit mostly in the sparsely populated west) as well as a huge swath of Syria. Mr. Obama's strategic vision of high-flying U.S. warplanes and Arab boots on the ground vanquishing Islamic State is, at best, stalled and, at worst, seen as an ill-disguised sectarian anti-Sunni war in concert with Tehran-backed Shia militias.
After Ramadi fell, Mr. Obama said, "I don't think we are losing." He called it a tactical setback. Others aren't so sanguine.
"We are in fact losing this war," General Jack Keane, the former deputy commander of the U.S. Army, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee after Islamic State seized Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria only days apart last week. "Moreover, I can say with certainty, that this strategy will not defeat ISIS," he added, referring to the U.S.-led air war against Islamic State.
Critics point to Libya where, four years after Mr. Obama's U.S.-led "air-strikes-only" doctrine backing feuding militias' boots on the ground, the county is a violence-torn shambles.
But despite mission creep – there are already between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Special Forces and military advisers inside Iraq – Mr. Obama remains steadfastly opposed to putting American ground troops into the fight.
"We need to have a total of 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in order to provide the necessary enablers [and] advisers," Fred Kagan, an American Enterprise Institute analyst and former professor of military history at West Point, told the Senate hearing. "Anything less than that is simply unserious."
Mr. Obama rejects those calls. "There are some in Republican quarters who have suggested that I've over-learned the mistake of Iraq, and that, in fact, just because the 2003 invasion did not go well doesn't argue that we shouldn't go back in," he said last week in an interview with The Atlantic. He added: "If the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them."
Others claims it is Mr. Obama who has failed to learn the grim lessons of Iraq. "George W. Bush at least had the guts to reverse and sponsor the surge, which we eventually then succeeded. I wish, I pray, that Barack Obama would do the same thing," Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was Mr. Obama's opponent in the 2008 presidential elections, said after the fall of Ramadi.