But with no troops on the ground, no rapprochement with Assad, no chance of Kurdish or Iraqi forces really being capable of offensive duties, what will this achieve? I have not even mentioned the Free Syrian Army, for good reason too, it is worthless and struggles to hold any territory inside of Syria.
Plus we have Libya - this sad country does not make the news now, the world having moved on. But Libya has not moved on, it has moved backwards, by about 100 years. Split by rival militias with either General warlords or lunatic religious terrorists. Libya was once a prosperous country, a small population and plentiful resources of oil and gas. A nice Mediterranean climate to boot.
What did Western intervention achieve in Libya in the long-term. Gaddafi is gone and replaced by a worse situation, much like Iraq. Extremism has a new fertile territory.
There was no plan in Libya and there is no plan for Syria. Iraq perhaps could be returned to its whole but this is unlikely as the schism in the Muslim world between Shia and Sunni is akin the the reformation in Europe. This will not be settled over a few years but many decades.
When the UK voted to not go into Syria last year, people now say this made it worse and allowed IS to flourish. This is a simplistic approach to what happened. IS grew from funding from Qatar and Saudi Arabia who now at last seem to be realising the need to kill the monster they have created. IS grew because Shia Iraqi government lost support in Northern Iraq. The governance of Iraq needs attention, which it is now getting.
The problem of IS is not a creature of the West. The crazy terrorists use Western hostages and threaten the West for purposes of extortion and to gain more enlistees. We would do better to ignore them and encourage the regional powers to annihilate them. Bombing randomly from afar will do little or nothing to improve the situation and only goes to further enhance copycat terrorism around the world in the Phillipines etc.
Instead a vote is for a permanent war against radical Middle East factions, one that is stateless and probably impossible to win through military means. We have tried for nearly 20 years and still the war goes on. It is hauntingly similar to Orwell's Eurasia war of 1984.
