https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dDw-zFFhFgc
US
Secretary of State John Kerry says countries inside and outside the
Middle East have pledged military support against IS militants with some
nations offering ground troops
The smart thing for Western
leaders in the wake of John Kerry's session with Arab leaders in Jeddah
on Thursday last, would have been to bide their time. But Tony Abbott
leapt straight in – committing 600 Australian military personnel and
more aircraft to the conflict, thereby giving the Arab leaders good
reason to believe that if they sit on their hands for long enough, the
West will fight their war for them.
Either collectively in Jeddah or
in one-on-one meetings with Kerry as in Cairo, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman
and Lebanon all have baulked at making explicit military commitments to
confront a force that they all see as a direct threat to their thrones,
bunkers and, in one or two cases, tissue-thin democracies. With the
exception of Iraq, which has no option because it is under attack at
home, none has publicly committed military support.
Conversely,
Abbott was coy in claiming that this new deployment did not mean that
Australia was at war??? Australia has been at war since its first
airlift of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north
of Iraq last week.
Because they are on the ground in the UAE doing
logistics and maintenance or in Baghdad and Irbil as military advisers
certainly would not absolve any of them from being a target if IS
fighters contrived to get access to them. It's also a dramatic instance
of mission-creep in a conflict bedevilled by uncertainty and missing any
clear sense of a timeline or even the vague contours of what "victory"
might look like.
US President Barack Obama demanded that Iraq form
an inclusive, representative government before he would commit. But
just three days after the new prime minister said he would behave
himself, Obama had aircraft over Iraq, and we still know nothing about
how different this Iraqi leadership will be from the last. There is no
certainty that it will win the confidence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes.
An air war cannot succeed without a substantial boots-on-the-ground
accompaniment – and that part of what Obama calls a strategy is very
much on a wing and a prayer.
The Kurdish Peshmerga can fight, but
they can't defend all of Iraq. The Iraqi army, trained and equipped by
Washington at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, is erratic and
more likely to cut and run than to stand and fight. Next door in Syria,
Obama is banking of the ranks of the Free Syrian Army – which for years
he has complained could not be counted on, and which Washington now
tries to convince us can be taken to Saudi Arabia, retrained and sent
home to win the war.
Abbott must have had his hands over his ears
last week as Obama spoke to the US nation and analysts around the globe
distilled his words to mean a conflict that will last for years.Oddly,
the Prime Minister warned Australians to prepare for a fight that might
last "months rather than weeks, perhaps many, many months indeed…" Seems
he's in as much of a hurry to get into this war, as he seemingly thinks
he will get out of it. He's simply hides from the truth.
It's not
clear why. This "we must do something right now" response is likely to
create a bigger mess than already exists in the region. Consider: the
death of 200,000 locals in Syria failed to rouse much of a reaction in
the West; but the deaths of two Americans – and now a Briton – has
raised a crescendo for international war when it might have made more
sense to tackle regional politicking and feuding first.
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