Amid the ruins of Iraq and Syria, the caliphate has been reborn. Drawing on an idealized past, the Islamic State has developed not only a new model army, but a functioning government with ever deeper roots, spreading branches and a mystical appeal to militant Muslims.

The Obama administration’s response has been to deny the caliphate’s reality, downplay the Islamic State’s military successes and continue to insist that Islam has nothing to do with Islamist fanaticism.

How can we hope to defeat a movement we won’t understand?

In the military, you’re taught that you should never underestimate your enemy. Yet, we continue to minimize the capabilities, appeal and power of this expanding caliphate.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter mortified Washington and Baghdad when he stated the obvious: Iraqi troops had not shown the will to win. But the problem isn’t merely that Iraq’s military, on which we lavished many billions, lacked motivation. It’s that the Islamic State’s fighters have motivation to spare.

Training matters, of course. And weapons certainly matter (and ISIS now has plenty of US-made weapons abandoned by the Iraqis we trained). But strength of will trumps all. Jihadis not only willing but eager to die face Iraqis who fear beheading and run away.

What men fight for



When I served on active duty (in the days of crossbows and catapults), it was a truism that Arab nations couldn’t fight — we’d watch outnumbered Israeli forces shatter Arab armies again and again. What we missed was that people in different cultures fight for different things.

To Arabs, the state has always been an enemy. It extorted taxes and countless bribes, conscripted your sons and wouldn’t protect you from the powerful sheikh or official who wanted your land or your daughter.

But Arabs fight ferociously for three things: their faith, their tribe and their turf. By mirror-imaging, we missed this essential reality.

And faith is foremost. Our secularized elites dread and deny it, but the power of religious faith is the mightiest strategic force in history. Empires rise and fall, but faiths endure. And when a faith-based culture falls into crisis, it turns militant. As the Middle East hit a dead end, a radical revival of Islam, preaching the glories of a golden age, was simply inevitable.

ISIS is, above all, a cult of believers. Some actions may be cynical, some figures may prove corrupt, but that does not discount the dynamic, transcendent power of faith. The Islamic State’s message, hideous to us, resounds in troubled souls among the faithful.

For those who catch the contagion of fanaticism, violence can be ecstatic and cathartic. The tortures and beheadings, mass butchery and burning captives alive, are intoxicating and exhilarating, acts of rapturous purification for the recently disenfranchised. They’re also brilliant psycho-terror weapons, a vital component of the ISIS brand.

In our horror at the Islamic State’s atrocities, we miss the fact that jihadis are having fun.

Grasping this truth is essential: For young males drawn to the Islamic State, who’ve suffered social dysfunction and dislocation, there’s no drug as addictive as human blood. The Islamic State grants jihadi recruits a dispensation to torture, murder, kidnap, rape and wreck.

Our State Department wants them to work at Walmart.

In our horror at the Islamic State’s atrocities, we miss the fact that jihadis are having fun. And if you die, you go to paradise, a martyr with benefits.

Perhaps we should rethink our counter-offer?

Terrorist Messiah?



In the wake of 9/11, I warned that Osama bin Laden might be merely Islamism’s John the Baptist, with the terrorist messiah still to come.

Islamic State’s caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, may prove to be that electrifying figure (and even when messiahs die, their faith may well live on). This monster in human form has created a regional power from the defeated scraps of a broken terror movement. And he did it almost overnight. Instead of denigrating that accomplishment, we should study it and learn from our flawed assumptions.

Nor is the Islamic State purely destructive. It’s a genuine community of believers. Where it rules, it regulates (if harshly) and restores. It may smash ancient treasures and ban cigarettes, but it delivers public services, the rule of (Sharia) law and the certainty humans crave in disordered times.

The Islamic State’s rules may be savage, but they’re clear. And many a human gladly will trade nerve-wracking freedoms for clarity.

We have no strategy



Faced with a foe prepared to do almost anything to impose its vision on the world, how great is our strength of will?

It’s all but non-existent. We have the greatest military in history, but dread using it. We deploy hyper-expensive aircraft and encourage lawyers to render them useless. Our president’s priority isn’t defeating the enemy, but avoiding civilian casualties. It’s an appallingly naïve vision of warfare and a fool’s denial of what it takes to win.

In the name of humanitarianism, our president dreads accidentally killing civilians. So he condemns millions, both the willing and unwilling, to live under the Islamic State’s murderous tyranny.

Because our president will not accept hundreds of deaths, tens of thousands have died. And far more will die, including, in time, Americans.

Rather than act to end the misery, the administration makes endless token gestures, the latest of which is to send 450 personnel (of whom merely a quarter would be trainers) to ravaged Anbar Province in what was once Iraq. Our president spoke blithely of the need to “accelerate” the training of Iraqis. It’s criminal that not one of our senior military leaders called him on it.

Another military maxim officers learn early in their careers is “Don’t reinforce failure, reinforce success.” Our very expensive, years-long efforts to train Iraq’s military failed catastrophically and repeatedly. We’re offered all sorts of excuses, but the bottom line is that Iraqis won’t fight for a government they don’t trust. Only Iran-backed militias, the Shia counterparts of the Islamic State, fight with any spirit.

Still, we cling to “training” as a cure-all. As the cliché runs, a symptom of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, expecting a different outcome. By that standard, we’re flat-out nuts.

If we could not train the Iraqis adequately when we had thousands of trainers on the ground and unlimited resources, how can our president believe that a quickie training program starting from scratch will convince frightened Iraqi conscripts to stand up to what is now, man for man, the most potent fighting force in the Middle East outside of Israel?

“We don’t yet have a complete strategy” to fight ISIS, Obama admitted last week. No one in the caliphate was surprised.

What about us?



We’re losing. Badly. Because we lie to ourselves, wallow in guilt fantasies, and refuse to act effectively. Political sops and pundits repeat that “There’s no military solution.” Well, the truth is we’ve never tried a serious military solution. Even under George W. Bush, we pulled our punches disastrously. Now we are where we are.

I dread and despise ISIS and everything it stands for. It’s a blood-drunk throwback to history’s darkest epochs. But as a soldier, I have to respect the Islamic State’s fighting abilities.

Consider the Islamic State’s victory in Ramadi. It was stunning. In the future, staff colleges and guerilla movements alike will study that operation for lessons in how a badly outnumbered band of unconventional warriors can defeat a much-larger force and conquer a major city.

The assault on Ramadi was brilliantly planned and executed. Using sleeper cells, dozens of coordinated car bombs, deception, surprise, shock, merciless violence, psychological terror and even exploiting the weather, the Islamic State pulled off an operation that the US military would not dare to execute today — not because our soldiers lack the skills, but because we’ve conditioned their leaders to put caution above all else.

The US military has not attempted such a high-risk conventional operation since the Inchon Landings 65 years ago.

Dear Mr. President: The JV team is winning. And you’re not even in the game.

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, Fox News Strategic Analyst, and author of the new book “Valley of the Shadow.”