IRAQ

The UK Government, backed by the official opposition, has returned to the scene of one of our worst foreign policy misadventures. British fighter jets are once again dropping bombs on Iraq.

We should remember that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the chaotic dismantling of the Ba’athist state, was meant to be an exercise in enlightened ‘liberal intervention’.

Today, however, Iraq is a broken and corrupt state, and is a country that is ravaged by sectarian conflict. Its border with Syria, fractured by perpetual civil war, no longer exists. A self-declared caliphate has been established by Islamic State (IS), a group of barbarous Sunni supremacists, who are highly motivated and well-trained. Many of the militants are from Europe, and the overarching objective of IS is one of genocide. Air strikes may have halted their advances in northern Iraq and parts of Syria but the militants will inevitably regroup, just as the Taliban has done in Afghanistan.

The Yazidis, a group of ancient religious minorities, along with Christians and Kurds, are being persecuted, murdered or cleansed from their ancestral homes. For these groups this is now an existential struggle for survival.

Throughout the region, too, tensions fester. The conflict between Sunnis and Shias shows no sign of abating, and President Assad and his fellow Alawites, a heterodox Shia sect, are holding onto power in what is largely left of Syria. Assad is holding on largely through the proxy support of Iran and through Lebanon’s Shia militia Hezbollah, which itself has sustained heavy losses fighting rebel groups in Syria.

The convolutions and corrupt autocracies within the Gulf, some of whom have been funding and arming the various anti-Assad groupings but now fear blowback, have joined Barack Obama’s fight against Islamic State. Saudi Arabia, for instance, looks both ways on terrorism: it musters all in its power to promote Wahhabism worldwide while simultaneously posing as an ally of the US and Britain, from which it buys fighter jets and other military hardware. For some, IS became a product of Saudi foreign policy.

We should wonder whether President Obama has a coherent strategy for the Middle East. The President was, after all, deeply reluctant to become embroiled and sucked into another Middle East war. In August last year, the US and British were preparing to intervene in Syria on the side of the rebels after the murderous Assad regime used chemical weapons against his own people in Aleppo. Now, the US-led coalition is bombing IS and the al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria, while remaining (ostensibly) opposed to President Assad.

Given the disastrous interventionist approach in both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003, citizens of the Western world should be asking what Mr Obama’s plan is. What stamina does the US have for nation-building in the Middle East? How does it intend to tackle and defeat IS when its hardened fighters are so adept at melting back into the civilian population and when the president steadfastly refuses to countenance the use of US ground troops? What plan does America have for brokering peace between Sunni and Shia factions in Iraq? And what of geopolitical and diplomatic relations with Iran, without which there can be no lasting peace in the Middle East? Turkey, too, a NATO ally, needs to be fully engaged. The ultimate solution to the conflicts in the Middle East must come from within the region itself.

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Without our aerial support, responsibility for containing IS falls on Iraq’s weak army, overstretched and poorly equipped Kurdish peshmerga fighters, the forces of Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, and a ragtag coalition of secular Syrian militias. Whilst the West should continue to support the Kurds diplomatically and arm their fighters, this alone will not be enough to prevent the genocide of the religious minority groups. If IS is allowed to gain strength and momentum, its deadly threats may well soon extend beyond the Middle East.

Following the democratic debate in the House of Commons Britain is right to join the US air strikes in Iraq. The Baghdad government’s plea for help and assistance makes this war legal. The campaign also has broad regional support, and is a last resort, given that you cannot negotiate with a ruthless and barbaric terrorist organisation.

The UK’s involvement is an admission of culpability for the condition of Iraq. Iraq is what it is now because of what has transpired since that ill-judged invasion of 2003. But while the British Parliament has been eager to support the Americans in the most of limited circumstances, i.e. it has backed intervention in Iraq but not in Syria, with the RAF having allocated six GR4 Tornados, based in Cyprus, to deal specifically with IS positions in Iraq, anything beyond this symbolic support would be a profound mistake. No matter how enthusiastic the Prime Minister is to engage IS in Syria, there is no desire or willingness among the British people for British involvement in a regional and intra-Islamic conflict that David Cameron has already said could last 30-years or more.