The life of a British aid worker held hostage in Syria hangs by a thread. The lives of scores of journalists and hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi civilians have already been cut short. More than 700 captured Iraqi soldiers appear to have been executed in a single massacre. Islamic State has metastasised from a jihadist slogan to a murderous force bent on redrawing the map of the Middle East. In Syria an illegitimate regime is clawing back control. In Iraq a legitimate one is losing it.
The price of inaction by western governments and their potential regional allies in the maelstrom consuming Iraq and Syria is already immeasurably high. As Nato’s heads of government meet today in Wales they may be preoccupied by Russia’s challenge to stability in Europe, but they should be under no illusion about the jihadist challenge to civilisation farther east. Without co-ordinated and resolute military action against Islamic State targets wherever they can be found, the cost of doing too little, too late in Iraq and Syria will only rise.
Writing in The Times today, President Obama and David Cameron urge other Nato members to boost defence spending and support for democratic institutions in Iraq. This will be welcome if it happens, but it will not be sufficient. Mr Obama’s pledge yesterday to build a coalition to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State was more promising. He warned that this would take time and is probably right, although he bears much of the blame.
Islamic State is a monster that has thrived in a power vacuum created to a large extent by Mr Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria’s civil war or in an Iraq from which he had recently withdrawn US combat troops. Yet Europe’s leaders are culpable as well — too slow to respond to a gathering storm in their own hemisphere, too timid in the face of domestic pressure to ignore it and too quick to assume the American security umbrella would function now as it has in the past.
In an unfortunate excess of candour, Mr Obama admitted last week that he had no strategy for Syria and Iraq. If this was his way of saying no feasible strategy was available, it was defeatist and wrong. Islamic State is overstretched and a byword for evil and inhuman extremism even among those it seeks to rule. It is a problem that demands a military solution, and is clearly beatable.
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The transatlantic alliance must therefore unite urgently behind a strategy that supports Iraq’s armed forces with targeted air strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria as well as Iraq; that arms Kurdish peshmerga troops and moderates within the Free Syrian Army (FSA); and that persuades reasonable Arab governments they can no longer stand by as mute witnesses to Islamic State barbarism.
This is not a counsel of indiscriminate violence but of seizing the moment and making up for lost time. Air strikes launched from the Arabian Sea have quickly and dramatically changed the military balance in the battle to retake Mosul Dam and this week to break the siege of the Shia-dominated town of Amerli, north of Baghdad.
The principle of hot pursuit gives justification for strikes on extremist strongholds inside Syria. The sickening beheading of American and potentially British hostages justifies the use of force without explicit parliamentary consent. The arming of moderate factions in the FSA clearly carries risks, but the alternatives are worse. It is a strategy that was right three years ago. Politicians have delayed its implementation with shameful consequences, but it is still right now.
The lands that the terrorists seek to rule are aflame with two civil wars overlaid by extreme sectarian strife. It is complex, but complexity is no argument for standing back. It is the price of a failure to lead. Nato and its allies in the Middle East must now find the courage to put it right.