Actually when you at things from the appropriate historical perspectives, you’ll see that indeed we did leave very quickly.
And not only did we leave quickly, we announced well before the exact dates we would leave on/ A bad mistake in itself. Because it tells the enemy ‘Don’t waste your fighters right now… wait until –/–/—- after we’ve left.”

In May 1945 we defeated fascist Europe, Hitler was dead, war criminals either in captivity awaiting trial or were being hunted down.
Today our forces still hold bases in Europe 70+ years later.
In 1953 we reached a cease fire between North Korea and South Korean forces at the 38th parallel. 60+ years later we still have protective forces there to enforce the cease fire.

We don’t have weak kneed liberals who hate America demanding they be returned in mass. We rotate and replace forces in and out of Europe and Asia.

The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been well served to do the same there. As it would take at least 2 to 3 generations of the indigenous people to reform from Fascist Islamic Extremism to a more civil Islamic country. Like Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

One just needs to look at the latest news to see how Iraqi forces along with Kurdish fighters quickly took back control of the critical Mosul Dam in Iraq. When America offered to lend them some backbone with air strike covering forces. They are ready to fight, but still require our presence and assurance of success to do so.

The summary is: It is a mistake to sacrifice our national ‘blood and treasure’. And not be willing to invest appropriate time and services to keep and protect that costly investment from enemy control.

We didn’t leave quickly. We spent eight years in Iraq. We’re still in Afghanistan after 13 years and nothing is getting better. The Afghan public supports the Taliban, not the Karzai government that we back.

We spent all this time training the Iraqi Army and it just collapsed in the most pathetic, unprofessional way. Whether we left in 2011 or 15 years later, the bloody collapse of Iraq was inevitable.

“Couldn’t the UN send a force to northern Iraq, preferably comprised of countries who don’t go around invading and bombing countries for their natural resources? Isn’t that more likely to protect people than another imperial ‘humanitarian’ intervention?”

Yes, the UN has such an exemplary record with this sort of thing.

Couldn’t the UN send a force to northern Iraq, preferably comprised of
countries who don’t go around invading and bombing countries for their
natural resources? Isn’t that more likely to protect people than another
imperial ‘humanitarian’ intervention?

That would be wonderful.

Meanwhile back in the real world, in the absence of the dependable, humanitarian UN, the US and the UK are the only countries that actually are helping those refugees. They are actually saving lives. I’m sure they would be more than happy for other countries to step up or even take over, because a lot more help is needed. Nothing is stopping the UN or other groups of countries from doing so, apart from their own indifference.

Maybe you should get on the phone to the UN or the embassises of other countries instead of just carping about the immediate saving of lives because you don’t approve of the people doing the saving.

On the contrary, the birth and growth of what has become ISIS was facilitated not by the west but by Syria’s own Baathist regime, which changed its fierce anti-Islamist strategy after 2003, to one of accomodating them and encouraging them to go and disrupt Iraq. The idea was that so long as they didn’t crap on their own doorstep (Syria), they could be useful to frustrating US power.

The terrorism experts were not entirely wrong [after 911], in believing that – for some time at least – Syria was outside al-Qaida’s orbit.

This changed in 2003 when Assad allowed the jihadists in his country to link up with Zarqawi and become part of a foreign fighter pipeline stretching from Lebanon to Iraq, with way points, safehouses and facilitators dotted across the country. With the active help of Assad’s intelligence services, Syria was opened to the influx – and influence – of experienced and well-connected jihadists from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco, who brought with them their contact books, money and skills. Within a few years, the country ceased to be a black spot on the global jihadist map: by the late 2000s it was familiar terrain to foreign jihadists, while jihadists from Syria had become valued members of al-Qaida in Iraq, where they gained combat experience and acquired the international contacts and expertise needed to turn Syria into the next battlefront.

That is why ISIS/ISIL is based in Eastern Syria. it’s where the Baathists helped them set up. Even until recently, Assad’s regime and ISIS have hardly fought each other, and have even colaborated agaisnt the SFA. ISIS is the lodger that the Baathists let grow too large and now cannot evict.

Initially it seemed as if it was it was a tap that could be safely turned off when needed:

Practically overnight [in 2003], Syria became the principal point of entry for
foreign jihadists hoping to join the Iraqi insurgency. Inside the country, Assad’s intelligence services activated their jihadist collaborators. The most prominent among them was Abu al-Qaqaa, a Salafi cleric from Aleppo who had studied in Saudi Arabia and whose sermons attracted hundreds – sometimes thousands – of people. Before the invasion of Iraq, Abu al-Qaqaa’s followers acted as religious vigilantes, meting out punishments for ‘indecent behaviour’ and stirring up hatred against the infidel governments of Israel and America. After the invasion, his group turned into a hub which provided Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq with Syrian recruits. Qaqaa’s efforts were so successful that for most of 2003 Syrians constituted the largest foreign fighting contingent of the (emerging) insurgency. Four years later, when the political calculus had changed and the Syrian government wanted to slow down the traffic, Qaqaa was shot dead in mysterious circumstances. His funeral was attended by members of the Syrian
parliament along with thousands of Islamists. According to a Lebanese
media report, ‘his coffin was draped in a Syrian flag and the affair had
all the trappings of a state occasion.’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/peter-neumann/suspects-into-collaborators

It is no longer possible to control them, partly because while the Baathists had once eradicated home grown Syrian Islamists, the more recent ones they have let in are mostly foreigners, including very experienced and dangerous jihadis.

Whatever the debated make-up of the FSA, the west most certainly has not been arming or aiding ISIS and it did not create them. So much as any party did, it was Baathist Syria. For some time it has been unable to control it, and looks as if it may now be dawning on Assad and co that ISIS really is not interested in cohabitation and that the lodger in the basement is going to have to go or he will pull the entire house down.

Which is why any supporter of Assad or the FSA or Iran or Iraq or even the US and anyone in the rest of the Middle East or indeed the world, who is not a raving Sunni Islamist, has an interest in the defeat of ISIS.

The plight of the Yazidi community in Iraq is finally being taken seriously.

I know it sticks in the throats of much of the western left to ever give them a moment’s sympathy, but there are also tens of thousands of Christians in and around Mosul being subjected to horrors that are unbearable to read about and. They deserve a mention too.

The left has not acquitted itself well with regard to the repsonse to these genocides (and they are actual genocides, unlike the non-existent one in Gaza, however bad the situation there is). It has either chosen to ignore them, possibly due to distate for Christians, or outright opposed intervention due to hatred of the USA and wish to it fail in absolutely anything it does. For a number of them, this has meant opposing stopping actual genocide and claiming falsely that airdrops and interdictions cannot help the Yazidis, Christians and Kurds.

Next time the left tries to compaign ont he subjecthuman rights abuses or humanitarian catastrophes, then as things stand it will not have much moral high ground from which to do so. It needs to earn that high ground back. I am not overlooking that there are few MPs on any side demanding more support for the people at risk, and that those few MPs do include honourable Labour MPS. I look forward to a time when the likes of Mike Gapes, James Bloodworth and co are in the ascendant, and Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones and others are reviled rather than fondly feted.

For now, I would like to see Ed Miliband and other senior Labour figures pushing the government to speed up its so-far unimpressive act and help save many thousands lives in Iraq.

He’s a moderate right winger, sure.

And our political parties have drifted right – there’s little evidence there’s been significant shift in the electorate, but rather a great deal of effective disenfranchisement.

You could alson argue – correctly – that the British politics was to the right of many European countries (Germany, Scandinavia). If Obama isn’t of the left, he’s a helluva lot more left wing than the crazies in the Republican Party.

The level of debate on here is brilliant – I’m sure James Bloodworth is really pleased.