The American’s insistence that whatever could be outsourced was outsourced meant that Iraqi colonels were provided with enormous sums of money to pay not only their soldiers’ wages, but also all the other costs necessary to maintain an army.The men charged with allocating these funds became hugely powerful and influential and, rather than spending it on things like fuel and ammunition, siphoned much of it off into their own coffers.

A parade of former leaders responsible for the destruction of Iraq and, thus, the rise of ISIL – John Howard, Tony Blair and the perennial warmonger Dick Cheney – have come forward in recent months to try and expunge their culpability from the historical record. However it was their neoliberalism that has spawned what is, today, essentially a failed State.

Soldiers would join the army, receive their pay-check, kick-back half of it to his officer – who’d then distribute it amongst all the other officers – and then go and work a second job somewhere else. When Mosul fell, it’s estimated that only one in three soldiers who were meant to be there actually were. And once IS were advancing, it was the leaders who were the first to flee.

As predicted by the Iraqi official, the some 30,000 troops stationed there left their posts, shed their uniforms and fled the few thousand (or less) advancing ISIL fighters.

Now, with the Iraqi army having all but completely dissolved, the U.S. and its allies have committed to air strikes to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIL.

President Obama, Tony Abbott and a host of other world leaders that claim to be committed to fighting ISIL have become fond of saying that this is primarily Iraq’s fight, not theirs.

What they fail to say is that their commitment to the privatisation of the Iraqi army at the expense of proficiency is responsible for destroying the very institution they’ve now charged with taking the fight to ISIL. It’s these boys we say we’re going to train who won’t come out of their barracks.