More UK Troops to Iraq?

Once again we bumble forward on a military adventure not thought through to prop up a foreign policy which is dysfunctional. The Defence Secretary has announced that some hundreds of British troops are to go to Iraq to train local forces. What is the point of that? Where will this lead?

The talk of defeating ISIS by military means is way off the mark. It may be possible to contain its advance and this may have been done already. The Islamic State has fighters who have rampaged all over Syria and Iraq, but it  is not a military power whose defeat on the battlefield will put it out of business. It is an idea and an ideology born out of Sunni disaffection with post Saddam Iraq and repudiation of the Sykes Picot borders of the old Ottoman territories, which ignored tribal roots and which amounted to a colonial carve up of spoils.

The only military solution to the problems in the Middle East is for one power to occupy the whole region. This would require an occupation army of about three million crack troops and local allied forces of about the same number. This is a military and political non-stater. The alternative is to step back and let the Arab nations sort out their differences on their own, disengaging from everything except the purchase of their oil, which believe me, all the warring parties are as keen as mustard to sell.

But to tinker about at the margin training people who only switch sides later is utterly futile in terms of ending suffering and achieving peace. The failed state line up of Iraq and Libya, together with imploding Syria and tottering Afghanistan should teach us that.