Alex Massie Alex Massie

We may not think ourselves at war with ISIS but they are pretty sure they are at war with us.

John McTernan’s column in today’s Telegraph about Kurdistan – and our, that is the West’s, debt of honour to the Kurds – is a piece of which, I think, the late Christopher Hitchens would have been proud. The Kurds had no greater western defender than Christopher and he would, I believe, have been appalled by the pusillanimity on display in Whitehall and the White House alike in recent days.

Granted, ‘because Christopher Hitchens would have supported it’ is an insufficient justification for military action. Then again, the witless self-abasement of the so-called Stop the War coalition is no reason to oppose it either. (By Stop the War, of course, they mean let someone vile win the war.)

Nevertheless, some lessons can be absorbed too thoroughly. Why bother? It’s not our fight. Let them sort it out themselves. We’ve been down this road before and look where it led. And, besides, this is all our fault anyway.

Well, maybe. But just as conflicts differ so do interventions. No-one proposes deploying the 101st Airborne Division or the Royal Marines to Kurdistan. All that interventionists suggest is that we help create the conditions in which ISIS can first be halted, then routed. The hardest work will be done by others, chiefly, though far from exclusively the Kurdish Peshmerga.

Make no mistake, we may not consider ourselves at war with ISIS but they most assuredly reckon themselves at war with us. And with anyone else who does not share their murderous corruption of Islam. The world has rarely been short on horror but there is something especially horrifying about ISIS. If heads on pikes won’t convince you, what would be enough to persuade you this is an evil that must be confronted? And if not confronted today it will have to be confronted eventually.

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