W

e certainly cannot tolerate the massacre of the Yazidi people in Iraq. Nor can we allow all our hard work in Iraq come to naught or allow the Islamic State organization (IS) to gain a stronger foothold in Syria and thus truly challenge Assad.

However, none of these things justifies our aerial bombardment. The killing of minorities by butchers is a terrible thing but terrible things occur all over the world and we don'€™t intervene in this way.

By all means cut off military and financial supply routes. Provide humanitarian aid and support those who are fleeing, but bombing from the sky is counterproductive. At best it will retard them; at worst it will bolster their numbers.

Nor is a ground assault the answer. It failed in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives. The country'€™s infrastructure was ruined and has still not recovered. The Iraqi regime, like in Afghanistan, is being propped up by the West.

Both are unable after more than a decade of foreign intervention to stand on their own two feet. Putting troops on the ground to fight IS will have the same result.

Military victory is assured if you put enough troops there, but winning the hearts and minds of the people is highly unlikely. IS will simply fade into the background and re-emerge in another form somewhere else.

We cannot overcome groups like IS on their turf by brute force. We have to accept, as the US eventually had to do in Vietnam, that IS is here to stay, at least for some time.

Remember it is one thing to be able to amass a military force of some ten thousand or more (I suspect the numbers we are spoon-fed are incorrect) and take large tracts of relatively undefended lands. It is quite another to set up the administrative and civil systems that are needed to hold onto one'€™s '€œcaliphate'€.

But irrespective of this, the people who must fight IS, if fighting is to occur, are those in Iraq and Syria who are being mistreated. It is their right to defend themselves.

The West has no moral mandate to do so because we have not been attacked and our military intervention, while it gives our troops some real practice, is likely to fail.

Such intervention will not reduce the risk of terrorism abroad or at home; it will inflame it. Western governments are inciting the very thing they claim they are fighting against.

Moreover, as they shift the moral compass domestically away from natural justice in favor of draconian counterterror laws, they provide the fertilizer for radicalizing more and more Muslims.

Adam Bonner
Meroo Meadow, NSW Australia