Iraq (& Syria)

I've been reading the arguments about aerial intervention against ISIS in Iraq. I agree with the present proposals, Iraq has asked for help and it should be given where we can, although I have considerable doubt as to what can be achieved from the air. There are times that I suspect that a good old-fashioned Spitfire, using its cannons, could achieve more against a scattered mobile enemy than the latest high-tech bombs.

Syria is a totally different matter; Assad may be a nasty piece of work, but his election as president was at least as legitimate as many others around the world whom we are happy to tolerate. Our intervention against another nasty dictator in Libya has hardly been a roaring success. The fact is that past dictators throughout the Middle and Near East maintained reasonable calm for most ordinary people as long as they kept out of politics, and what has replaced them is largely chaos.

The problems, of course go, back to the time that the British and French carved up the middle east by drawing lines on a map and creating countries which took no account of tribal, ethnic or religious boundaries. It's a bit late now to do anything about it, but I would certainly favour the establishment of a proper Kurdish state if this could be achieved.

My main concern, however, is that the government does not appear to have done much within this country to improve our security from insider attacks. To me, the scandal in Rotherham serves to illustrate how scared our authorities are to do something which might upset the Muslim population, and one fears that they could be looking the other way with regards to security issues just as they did with abuse. Preventing potential jihadists from leaving the country by withdrawing passports hardly seems a solution, and stamping something across their passports like "Not Valid for Entry into UK" would seem a more sensible approach, even if it is against EU law. Forcing these potential jihadists to stay in the country surely increases the risk of terrorist action by these dissidents.

According to the Mail, the government has agreed to buy 20 Tomahawk missiles at a cost of over a million pounds each for use against ISIS. As I noted above, it is hard to see how these would be of much use against a scattered enemy, and seems to illustrate the problems of using high-tech weapons against a low-tech enemy, and I suspect that they will be no more use against ISIS than they would have been against the IRA in Northern Ireland.

My view, for what it is worth, is that the £20,000,000 would have provided better protection for UK residents if it had been spent on the security services and improved border control.

The Crusades

It must have been about fifty years ago when I was at a formal gathering and chatting to an Australian Army Officer of about my age who was attending the military School of Languages..
At that time, the iron curtain was still in place and the Chinese nation was beginning to flex its muscles militarily, leading to a feeling that world war might not be far away.. A joke of the day for those learning languages was that optimists learnt Russian and that pessimists learnt Chinese. This officer said to me that he thought both camps were wrong, and whilst we might have some smaller localised conflicts, in his view WW3 would be a re-run of the Crusades.
Like me, he will have been long retired, and if he is still around, he might get some grim satisfaction from David Cameron's warning that "Britain and the West face a decades-long battle against Islamist terrorism in North Africa."

In fact there was a series of Crusades, starting in 1071 when the Byzantine army was defeated by Turkish Muslims with the result that Christians were denied access to Jerusalem. This led to a series of Crusades against the Muslims, these occurring mainly between 1095 and 1291, a period of some 200 years. It was not one continuous war, but a long series of battles with various Muslim leaders trying to take or re-take territory in different parts of the Middle East.
Reading about the crusades, one is struck by the similarity with the events taking place now, with Christianity being driven out of the Middle and Near East by Muslim forces. There are no decisive battles that could be called a victory, and when defeated, the Islamic forces just move their efforts elsewhere, in which could end up as a long running conflict

Regrettably, I think that for once David Cameron is right. We clearly need to stop the spread of Islamic terrorism before it becomes a genuine threat to this country. In many ways, what happened in Algeria and what is happening in Mali, Sudan, Somaliland and Northern Nigeria, presents a far greater threat to this country than Sadam or Afghanistan ever did. Don't forget that much of the Iberian peninsular was occupied by the Moors for centuries, and they still regard it as their territory.

Time will tell what happens, but I don't think any of us alive today will see the resolution of this conflict, if indeed it is ever resolved.