Britain bombs Iraq.

News just in tells us that two British Tornados are off to join the cloud of warplanes above Iraq. The new Iraqi government, that the US has just bought, were told to ask for Britain's feeble support by their masters in the Pentagon. The UK's modicum of high explosive now targeted for Syria and Iraq would not normally give rise to so much as a text message request from a minor Bagdad civil servant in terms of its fire power. But it is, apparently, the UK's wisdom and historical experience in Iraq that was the clincher for Iraq's new Foreign Minister. Perhaps he means the experience of Britain's involvement in Iraq's 36 wars and armed conflicts which, starting with Britain's war against the Iraqi revolution in 1920 (where Britain used some of the stock of poison gas left over from WW1) has involved Britain many times in Iraq's destiny. Such wisdom! Such experience! 

Cameron is not so much interested in Iraq's future as in the future of oil and his relations with the US. He has started to march to the Pentagon's war drum because the US has called. It is a political matter of the continued legitimacy of the whole western debacle in the Middle East that is at stake for the US, and Britain's involvement (or not) in the current charade remains essential for that purpose. 

The military geniuses into whose hands the west's 'fly boys' and their weaponry have been put have already ordererd up the bombing of bits of Syria as well as Iraq. And already we have seen not so much 'mission creep' as mission 'skid'. US ships have 'diverted' some tomahawks to have a high explosive pop at a new group of snarling Islamists that they have called the 'Khorasan'. This little side show was necessary because the Khorasan (that no one with knowlege in the field as ever heard of) were about to move on the US we were told. We might wonder who else will need 'tidying up' on the margins before this latest rain of death is over? 

The word from one expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Today, BBC Radio 4, Sept 27) suggests that the current IS offensive against the Syrian-Kurdish town Kobane is a reaction to the IS having to abandon set bases and concentrate in battle - preventing 'clean' and 'surgical' responses from the US and its allies. And that more rolling offensives are likely to be IS's response to attacks from the air. The US led war has already created the first tentative moves for a common front by all the Syrian jihadis against the West's intervention; a disasterous result for the Syrian people. 

As more civilians die, as more particular scores are settled by annihilation, so the Brits will find that they have been hustled into promoting another disaster for all concerned. Blaire's enthusiastic 'hurrahs' from the sideline tell it all.