Joe a, how could anyone be happy with the 'hell on Earth' scenario that has exploded throughout the Middle East and the complete absence of a humane solution to its further escalation? Peter Hartcher's excellent article in The Age online today included these excerpts:
"...The first problem: Australia and allies have just stepped into a raging, ancient sectarian war. It's a civil war between the two main churches of Islam, the Shiite and the Sunni. And we have taken sides.
The ISIS fighters are partly a product of Sunni rage and frustration. And it was a rage and frustration set off by the US-British-Australian invasion in 2003 ..."
"... It didn't have to be that way after the invasion. But the US-endorsed prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, ran a vengeful sectarian government that persecuted the Sunni population. ..."
"... Sunni rage and frustration didn't merely flow spontaneously from Sunni streets and villages. It was fed and fuelled by wealthy groups in the region's Sunni powerhouse, Saudi Arabia. As Hill puts it: "The [Islamic State] movement got started with financial flows from NGOs in Saudi Arabia." ..."
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/wh...help-fight-islamic-state-20140901-10ax8l.html
Hugh White's equally excellent article also from The Age online today includes this:
"... The region includes not just a large number of the people of what used to be Iraq and Syria, but the powerful countries that are their immediate neighbours – especially Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. ..."
"... Anyone proposing a bigger Western intervention in this situation should be reminded that the solution to the problem of Islamic State will only come as an integral part of the establishment, probably in some quite different form, of a new regional political order. There is no serious reason to believe the new government now being assembled in Baghdad will be able to preserve the old Iraq as a part of that new order, and Western military interventions to support it are more likely to delay than hasten the emergence of a sustainable new regional settlement. ..."
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/in...ools-will-rush-into-iraq-20140901-10asyf.html
Having lit matches inside a gunpowder magazine, the 'Coalition of the Willing' now has the onerous and complex responsibility to prevent ethnic cleansing, genocide, the enslaving of women and children and even worse it has helped to unleash. Hand-passing total responsibility for that to US President Obama is not the answer and neither is chest-beating for cheap political gains.
