How your MP voted on Iraq strikes

[renton]

1. We are also one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet. With that comes responsibility.

2. Yes we are mostly to blame for the Iraqi army being shit. We dismantled most of the infrastructure of the Baathist state meaning those with experience running things like the civil service and the army were marginalised and often jailed instead of made integral to the reconstruction.

3-5. They aren't excuses. They are justifications. The countries with the largest armed forces are also the ones with the greatest diplomatic influence and the greatest capacity to threaten to obliterate the scum of the earth in global conflicts, thereby get them to stop, retreat or become less effective.

6. Because we have a big armed forces and we can. Other states abdicating their moral responsibility to humanity isn't an excuse for us to do so.

7. Switzerland are fucking cowards. I'd sooner be an active global military partner that sometimes gets it wrong than the consciously "neutral" bankers of Nazis and modern day ethnic cleansers.

The overwhelming majority of the UK's military interventions in my lifetime have been at least modestly successful and unequivocally justified. Gulf War 1. Successful. Bosnia. Successful. Kosovo. Successful. Sierra Leone. Successful. Afghanistan. Modestly successful. Gulf War 2. Failure. Libya. Modestly successful.

If you want me to post shorter posts, stop making so many absurd statements that are manifestly wrong on 7 of 8 levels.

Two points. One, we don't have large armed forces - we really don't. A single US carrier strike group can supply more fast jets and helicopters than the entirety of the RAF, a single deployable amrine division carries more boots and more firepower than any deployable unit in the British army. Afghanistan and Iraq nearly broke the British armed forces, and that's before the last round of cuts.

Secondly, there is no way that you can point toLibya as 'modestly successful', nor can Bosnia be looked upon as an unequivocal success - it was a bloody mire that half broke the NATO forces. Gulf war 1 was only a limited success in so much as there was then a gulf war 2. And even then it remainss the sole opportunity on your list for NATO forces to actually fight the war they'd spent 50 years training for.

[Confidemus]

1. We are also one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet. With that comes responsibility.

And that's where I stopped reading.

[bowmore]

You have to wonder if some of the people posting on here have ever been outside of the UK. reading some of the posts in here you'd think we are some third world state!

[Reynard]

You have to wonder if some of the people posting on here have ever been outside of the UK. reading some of the posts in here you'd think we are some third world state!

I doubt they've even been out their grim housing schemes.

[Confidemus]

I doubt they've even been out their grim housing schemes.

^^^ lives in Kincaidston.

[Ad Lib]

Two points. One, we don't have large armed forces - we really don't. A single US carrier strike group can supply more fast jets and helicopters than the entirety of the RAF, a single deployable amrine division carries more boots and more firepower than any deployable unit in the British army. Afghanistan and Iraq nearly broke the British armed forces, and that's before the last round of cuts.

"Aw but America are much bigger than us" - like, no shit renton. It doesn't invalidate the statement that we "have a big armed forces". We spend less in absolute terms on the military than only the US, Russia, China, France and Saudi Arabia. By other measures we also spend more than France. No other European country spends as high a proportion of their GDP on the military with the solitary exception of Ukraine. We are a major global military power. Just because the commitments of our recent conflicts have put our resources under strain, doesn't mean this isn't the case.

Secondly, there is no way that you can point to Libya as 'modestly successful', nor can Bosnia be looked upon as an unequivocal success - it was a bloody mire that half broke the NATO forces. Gulf war 1 was only a limited success in so much as there was then a gulf war 2. And even then it remainss the sole opportunity on your list for NATO forces to actually fight the war they'd spent 50 years training for.

Only if your criteria of success is "does this (indefinitely or long-term) end conflict in the regions in question and lead to stable and prosperous democratic states" can Libya, Bosnia or the First Gulf War be considered not even partial successes.

The objectives of military intervention are infinitely more modest than that. In Libya, the objective was to stop Gadaffi massacring Benghazi's civilian population with airstrikes. It was successful. It never pretended that it was going to make Libya a perfect country. It is, however, a less bad country than when its Head of State was butchering minority groups in its second city with no hope of fighting back.

In Bosnia, we forced the Dayton Accords, which largely ended hostilities in that part of Yugoslavia. Just shy of 20 years later, we now have several functioning democracies in the region, some of which have even joined the European Union. Success.

Gulf War 1. The objective was to expel Saddam Hussein from his illegal occupation of Kuwait. He was expelled. It was a success.

[SodjesSixteenIncher]

There's clearly a massive middle ground between being an aggressive perpectual war machine like the USA and Britain, and being Switzerland.

Would be nice (for us and the rest of the world) if we moved towards the middle a bit.

[renton]

"Aw but America are much bigger than us" - like, no shit renton. It doesn't invalidate the statement that we "have a big armed forces". We spend less in absolute terms on the military than only the US, Russia, China, France and Saudi Arabia. By other measures we also spend more than France. No other European country spends as high a proportion of their GDP on the military with the solitary exception of Ukraine. We are a major global military power. Just because the commitments of our recent conflicts have put our resources under strain, doesn't mean this isn't the case.

Only if your criteria of success is "does this (indefinitely or long-term) end conflict in the regions in question and lead to stable and prosperous democratic states" can Libya, Bosnia or the First Gulf War be considered not even partial successes.

The objectives of military intervention are infinitely more modest than that. In Libya, the objective was to stop Gadaffi massacring Benghazi's civilian population with airstrikes. It was successful. It never pretended that it was going to make Libya a perfect country. It is, however, a less bad country than when its Head of State was butchering minority groups in its second city with no hope of fighting back.

In Bosnia, we forced the Dayton Accords, which largely ended hostilities in that part of Yugoslavia. Just shy of 20 years later, we now have several functioning democracies in the region, some of which have even joined the European Union. Success.

Gulf War 1. The objective was to expel Saddam Hussein from his illegal occupation of Kuwait. He was expelled. It was a success.

We really aren't a global military power, there is only one of those, and they sure as hell don't need us. They'd already started bombing over there already. The question is less about the morality of starting to bomb, but rather why we feel the need to get involved. In general, the moral case is that all we do is increase the level of chaos, we shake things up, kill some folk, radicalise others, and the whole fucking thing comes round again in a few years. It's utterly futile. The materiale case is that we should give our armed forces the time and space to regenerate themselves. The army has been through the grinder constantly for 11 years, the air force is in the middle of a re-equipment cycle and the Navy is still reconfiguring itself as a carrier force. There is a strong argument, especially in the wake of the 2010 SDR cuts to leave them be for the minute, and not to throw them back in anywhere heavy until they are ready.

As for your case by case basis: Bosnia was a fucking mess, the fact that the still partially partitioned Bosnian state is at peace is definitely something to be thankful for, and yes, it was NATO air strikes on Serbian positions that eventually forced that situation, but for 3 years before that, there was mass slaughter and impotent UN peacekeepers doing little to stop it. It broke the armed forces as much as NATO eventually broke the Serbians.

Libya has collapsed into pretty much the same state it was before we started bombing shit out of the place. It was a hellhole before, it's a hellhole now - so what did we really achieve via the actions we undertook?

GW1, I'll grant you - that is what happens when you carefully plan what you are going to do, and with limits on what you expect to achieve and clear guidelines for making it happen (it also helps that it was a stand up fight between conventional forces). On the other hand those guidelines did not take into account the impact of ultimately leaving Saddam where he was - so y'know, there's that.

You cna't look at these things in isolation, and ultimately our actions impact us to an extent, even as the bombs impact literally on other people. You can't look a tthe end result while ignoring the process. We know that open ended missions with ill defined objectives lead to bloody messes from Vietnam to Afghanistan. We know that air strikes are fantastic tools for increasing the level of sheer chaos on the battlefield, but are not usually decisive on their own, they are our own weapons of terror, and they will simply radicalise as many as they kill. we have no real plan here, no idea of what we are meant to be acheiving beyond the instinctive impulse to 'do something' , we are going to commit our over stretched armed forces to yet another non time limited intervention, and hope for the best.

[MassiveFanDan]

We have a more fundamental moral obligation to take a lead in these wars half way across the world because our imperial past was a contributory factor to a lot of the diplomatic and military unrest that continues to exist in Africa and the Middle East and because ultimately, genocide in the Middle East is no more a tolerable or acceptable predicament to a liberal internationalist than genocide in Glasgow and we sure as hell would intervene to stop that if we had the means to do so.

You make a pretty good case for military action against Israel.

[Ad Lib]

There's clearly a massive middle ground between being an aggressive perpectual war machine like the USA and Britain, and being Switzerland.

Would be nice (for us and the rest of the world) if we moved towards the middle a bit.

We are not an aggressive perpetual war machine.

[Ad Lib]

1. We really aren't a global military power, there is only one of those, and they sure as hell don't need us. They'd already started bombing over there already. The question is less about the morality of starting to bomb, but rather why we feel the need to get involved.

2. In general, the moral case is that all we do is increase the level of chaos, we shake things up, kill some folk, radicalise others, and the whole fucking thing comes round again in a few years. It's utterly futile.

3. The materiale case is that we should give our armed forces the time and space to regenerate themselves. The army has been through the grinder constantly for 11 years, the air force is in the middle of a re-equipment cycle and the Navy is still reconfiguring itself as a carrier force. There is a strong argument, especially in the wake of the 2010 SDR cuts to leave them be for the minute, and not to throw them back in anywhere heavy until they are ready.

1. I didn't say we were a global military power. I said we had a big armed forces and that we have considerable military and diplomatic power. Which is true. We intervene because it is necessary for these missions to be multinational both to build the legitimacy of the intervention in the international community and to ensure that the US does not get a monopoly on ideas and approaches when it comes to post-conflict influence on the affected actors.

2. There is no evidence that air strikes will "increase the level of chaos" or that it will radicalise any more than are being radicalised in the absence of these strikes. There is, however, concrete evidence that they will force ISIS to retreat and give meaningful relief and opportunity to the hundreds of thousands of refugees to rebuild their lives while their government attempts to pull together a functioning military.

3. There is absolutely no evidence that sending a handful of RAF aircraft to drop a few bombs on ISIS is going to break the British military.

As for your case by case basis: Bosnia was a fucking mess, the fact that the still partially partitioned Bosnian state is at peace is definitely something to be thankful for, and yes, it was NATO air strikes on Serbian positions that eventually forced that situation, but for 3 years before that, there was mass slaughter and impotent UN peacekeepers doing little to stop it. It broke the armed forces as much as NATO eventually broke the Serbians.

Right so to be clear, the "proper channels" UN peacekeeping force was totally impotent and it took active bombing from NATO to force Milosovic to the table. So we're clear, "Bosnia was a fucking shambles, then we used proactive military force, and it helped to stop it being a fucking shambles." That's game set and fucking match to liberal interventionism, even if our armed forces suffered for it. They don't exist to be in pristine condition. They exist to make these kinds of situation better.

Libya has collapsed into pretty much the same state it was before we started bombing shit out of the place. It was a hellhole before, it's a hellhole now - so what did we really achieve via the actions we undertook?

We stopped one side of that conflict using aircraft indiscriminately to slaughter civilians. We have made a genocidal one-sided civil war a more even, less casualty intensive, civil war. That's a modest victory.

GW1, I'll grant you - that is what happens when you carefully plan what you are going to do, and with limits on what you expect to achieve and clear guidelines for making it happen (it also helps that it was a stand up fight between conventional forces). On the other hand those guidelines did not take into account the impact of ultimately leaving Saddam where he was - so y'know, there's that.

They didn't have to. Again, you don't have to create Nirvana to justify a military conflict. You just have to leave the situation marginally less bad than it was before.

You cna't look at these things in isolation, and ultimately our actions impact us to an extent, even as the bombs impact literally on other people. You can't look a tthe end result while ignoring the process. We know that open ended missions with ill defined objectives lead to bloody messes from Vietnam to Afghanistan. We know that air strikes are fantastic tools for increasing the level of sheer chaos on the battlefield, but are not usually decisive on their own, they are our own weapons of terror, and they will simply radicalise as many as they kill. we have no real plan here, no idea of what we are meant to be acheiving beyond the instinctive impulse to 'do something' , we are going to commit our over stretched armed forces to yet another non time limited intervention, and hope for the best.

We have a clear plan here. ISIS is in essence a paramilitary group operating in a part of Iraq that is mostly desert, with the occasional town and city connecting major essential services like oil refineries and pipelines. They are expanding to the North against the Kurds and Westwards towards the predominantly Shia part of Iraq. The purpose of airstrikes, as they have ALREADY PROVED PARTIALLY SUCCESSFUL IN DOING, is to force ISIS to retreat from the frontiers of their ever expanding territory.

This buys time and protection for the Kurd and Iraqi forces to hold back ISIS, and allow refugees to return to their towns and villages and rebuild their lives. This is a policy of containment, not obliteration. By buying the local forces time, this makes it harder for ISIS to expand beyond Iraq. It gives the Iraqi Army a chance properly to secure the Syrian border, thus cutting off major supply lines that sustain ISIS. It creates a safe aid corridor to help the victims of ISIS get help.

The long-term impact of such an intervention is that moderate Sunnis, who are by the way the overwhelming victims of ISIS: ISIS isn't radicalising people for the most part; it is terrorising its own sub-sect of Islam and enticing already radicalised foreign fighters away from groups like Al Qaida, is to give the cross-sect coalition government a chance to rebuild trust in the Sunni communities and to give them meaningful autonomy in their affairs and the security necessary for Iraq to continue to function in some form.

This isn't "not a plan". This isn't "nothing". This a perfectly reasonable response that is more likely than not to facilitate those objectives.

[Savage Henry]

You seem to accept that there are metaphorically legitimate battles in a metaphorically illegitimate war.

Only by refusing to support the ongoing US military agenda will we have any chance of addressing the underlying issues in the region. The US want ongoing conflict, it is there raison d'être as far as that part of the world is concerned. Anything we do to underpin their agenda is counter productive.

I can understand the argument to look at each situation on its merit but it's incredibly misleading to do so without considering the big picture. Apologies for the cliches.

I believe that international relations must necessarily be a tool for emancipation. I think for so long as it is driven by the balance between peace and war, we'll remain in a perpetual case of "calling it by the numbers" (lets play cliche bingo!). I don't regard the current situation as being the way things will always be. The security dilemma, or arming for peace as Billy Bragg puts it, is the reason for the current status quo. It's also entirely questionable, morally dubious and highly hypocritical. Which is the way the political and military elite want it, and indeed the free market libertarians. However...

... within that there lies an obligation to protect from rogue actors. And I think irrespective of history, the current threat in Iraq merits a liberal intervention.

Actually you put it well; within the illegitimate international system there is a legitimate need for military use; rework the system and that necessity dissipates. Absent that remodelling, we get left with a case of having to choose our battles.

I kind of think we're agreeing more than we're disagreeing here. I just don't see how leaving ISIS to do as they will amounts to an attempt to remodel the international system. Or at least, not in a beneficial way.

[Ad Lib]

You make a pretty good case for military action against Israel.

The State of Israel has not committed genocide. On the other hand, they have fought organisations which are, by explicit definition of their constitutions, pro-genocide, like Hamas.

[Scary Bear]

blaa blaa blaa...long post that gets cut off on the reply function on the P&B app.

If the people of Palestine/Gaza ask us for aid will we bomb Israel? No. Did we help out in Syria. No. We pick and choose when to help out. Did we even strongly advise Israel to stop bombing civilians?

We should not still be acting like we have an empire and are a superpower. We should not be randomly bombing people.

Politicians have stated that action in various countries (e.g Afghanistan, Iraq) will help prevent terrorism in the UK. How will killing people prevent terrorism in the UK? People have relatives and friends. Killing them will probably piss these friends and relatives off. Surely this will make terrorism more likely.

[Savage Henry]

If the people of Palestine/Gaza ask us for aid will we bomb Israel? No. Did we help out in Syria. No. We pick and choose when to help out. Did we even strongly advise Israel to stop bombing civilians?

We should not still be acting like we have an empire and are a superpower. We should not be randomly bombing people.

Politicians have stated that action in various countries (e.g Afghanistan, Iraq) will help prevent terrorism in the UK. How will killing people prevent terrorism in the UK? People have relatives and friends. Killing them will probably piss these friends and relatives off. Surely this will make terrorism more likely.

Well indeed. Politicians of all hues would be far better off dropping the pretence that the current military action has anything to do with preventing security issues in the UK and Europe - Europe is already home to sleeper cells within middle class communities. There is a far stronger case for framing this as a humanitarian intervention - much as the Kurdish save haven project was in the early 90s.

[Ad Lib]

If the people of Palestine/Gaza ask us for aid will we bomb Israel? No.

Because:

1. Israel isn't genocidal.

2. Bombing Israel, a major strategic partner in the Middle East, would be a flagrant act of aggression that would cause significant escalation, undermine our diplomatic relations with most of our closest allies, making our country less safe without doing anything to stop any excesses of aggression by Israel against Gaza.

3. The State of Israel has a legitimate right to defend itself against rockets fired at it by a terrorist group, which uses civilians as shields and hides rockets in UN schools and hospitals.

Did we help out in Syria. No.

We should have.

We pick and choose when to help out. Did we even strongly advise Israel to stop bombing civilians?

In back-channels we did urge them to be restrained. And actually, Israel has been far more restrained than, say, Assad against his own civilians or ISIS against Iraqis.

We should not still be acting like we have an empire and are a superpower. We should not be randomly bombing people.

There is nothing random about this bombing and it has f**k all to do with empire.

Politicians have stated that action in various countries (e.g Afghanistan, Iraq) will help prevent terrorism in the UK. How will killing people prevent terrorism in the UK? People have relatives and friends. Killing them will probably piss these friends and relatives off. Surely this will make terrorism more likely.

There is clear evidence that these conflicts, irrespective of whether or not we get involved, provide propaganda and radicalisation towards young Muslims in the UK. The key words are "irrespective of whether or not we get involved".

The justification for intervention isn't simply that it will make us safer, though undoubtedly a Middle East where groups like ISIS are weak and minorities rather than dominant regional forces would be a world with less radicalisation and fewer threats to Western civilians, but that the lives of ordinary Iraqis will be immeasurably improved by not being refugees to a theocratic paramilitary organisation committing war crimes and that we can significantly help their efforts in that respect.

We can't intervene everywhere that needs a strong military power to destroy evil people. I wish we could. But we should intervene wherever we can to the maximum extent to which we have reason to believe we can have a positive effect.

[Confidemus]

I've not read Ad Lib's posts, but are they as troll-y as a quick scan of them would suggest?

[Ad Lib]

Well indeed. Politicians of all hues would be far better off dropping the pretence that the current military action has anything to do with preventing security issues in the UK and Europe - Europe is already home to sleeper cells within middle class communities. There is a far stronger case for framing this as a humanitarian intervention - much as the Kurdish save haven project was in the early 90s.

Make room in your inbox!

[renton]

1. I didn't say we were a global military power. I said we had a big armed forces and that we have considerable military and diplomatic power. Which is true. We intervene because it is necessary for these missions to be multinational both to build the legitimacy of the intervention in the international community and to ensure that the US does not get a monopoly on ideas and approaches when it comes to post-conflict influence on the affected actors.

2. There is no evidence that air strikes will "increase the level of chaos" or that it will radicalise any more than are being radicalised in the absence of these strikes. There is, however, concrete evidence that they will force ISIS to retreat and give meaningful relief and opportunity to the hundreds of thousands of refugees to rebuild their lives while their government attempts to pull together a functioning military.

3. There is absolutely no evidence that sending a handful of RAF aircraft to drop a few bombs on ISIS is going to break the British military.

Right so to be clear, the "proper channels" UN peacekeeping force was totally impotent and it took active bombing from NATO to force Milosovic to the table. So we're clear, "Bosnia was a fucking shambles, then we used proactive military force, and it helped to stop it being a fucking shambles." That's game set and fucking match to liberal interventionism, even if our armed forces suffered for it. They don't exist to be in pristine condition. They exist to make these kinds of situation better.

We stopped one side of that conflict using aircraft indiscriminately to slaughter civilians. We have made a genocidal one-sided civil war a more even, less casualty intensive, civil war. That's a modest victory.

They didn't have to. Again, you don't have to create Nirvana to justify a military conflict. You just have to leave the situation marginally less bad than it was before.

We have a clear plan here. ISIS is in essence a paramilitary group operating in a part of Iraq that is mostly desert, with the occasional town and city connecting major essential services like oil refineries and pipelines. They are expanding to the North against the Kurds and Westwards towards the predominantly Shia part of Iraq. The purpose of airstrikes, as they have ALREADY PROVED PARTIALLY SUCCESSFUL IN DOING, is to force ISIS to retreat from the frontiers of their ever expanding territory.

This buys time and protection for the Kurd and Iraqi forces to hold back ISIS, and allow refugees to return to their towns and villages and rebuild their lives. This is a policy of containment, not obliteration. By buying the local forces time, this makes it harder for ISIS to expand beyond Iraq. It gives the Iraqi Army a chance properly to secure the Syrian border, thus cutting off major supply lines that sustain ISIS. It creates a safe aid corridor to help the victims of ISIS get help.

The long-term impact of such an intervention is that moderate Sunnis, who are by the way the overwhelming victims of ISIS: ISIS isn't radicalising people for the most part; it is terrorising its own sub-sect of Islam and enticing already radicalised foreign fighters away from groups like Al Qaida, is to give the cross-sect coalition government a chance to rebuild trust in the Sunni communities and to give them meaningful autonomy in their affairs and the security necessary for Iraq to continue to function in some form.

This isn't "not a plan". This isn't "nothing". This a perfectly reasonable response that is more likely than not to facilitate those objectives.

1. We don't though. We aren't a global military power and we don't have large armed forces. We intervene because the Americans lay it on thick about just how darm important us Brits are, an approach that makes even the most hardened British politician go weak at the knees (honourable excpetion to Harold Wilson). The US getting a monopoly on ideas - what the actual f**k? You talk in legalistic abstract in the face of actual reality. The US doesn't need a monopoly on the idea of it when they've got the monopoly on the hardware.

2. The Iraqis won't put together a functioning military, and it will eventually require US boots on the ground, in some capacity. Air strikes are a support to, not a substitute for ground offensives. There is plenty of evidence from Iraq 1, 2 and Afghansitan to the extent that blowing shit out of people's homes will have the effect of making them less sympathetic to your cause. They already don't like us.

3. Mounting a half dozen Tornados in Akrotiri speaks volumes of a military already broken.

As to the rest, the original UN force in Bosnia was already a liberal intervention, it was a complete farce and a great many people who shouldn't be dead, are. It didn't just become a liberal intervention when the UN took the brakes of the western forces in '95. You are talking about a doctrine of when to get involved, not a strategy of what to do when your there. and that 'liberal intervention' was a bloody mess for 3 years.

There is no victory in Libya. We deposed Ghaddafi, we didn't actually make anything better, there is no ceasefire, no stable government. We just went in there like olympian gods who'd been offended by Ghaddafi's hubris and tipped events against him. Plenty of basically innocent people who happened to be on his side will still die in a war that we decided he was the bad guy in, and to hell with the rest. It was an intervetion in the same way as a pint glass into a bar fight. You might tip the balance, but the fight goes on, someone is getting their head kicked in and your out the pub without particularly caring who it is.

marginally less on what time scale. These things don't happen in isolation, they have an impact on subsequent events.

[Ad Lib]

1. We don't though. We aren't a global military power and we don't have large armed forces. We intervene because the Americans lay it on thick about just how darm important us Brits are, an approach that makes even the most hardened British politician go weak at the knees (honourable excpetion to Harold Wilson). The US getting a monopoly on ideas - what the actual f**k? You talk in legalistic abstract in the face of actual reality. The US doesn't need a monopoly on the idea of it when they've got the monopoly on the hardware.

2. The Iraqis won't put together a functioning military, and it will eventually require US boots on the ground, in some capacity. Air strikes are a support to, not a substitute for ground offensives. There is plenty of evidence from Iraq 1, 2 and Afghansitan to the extent that blowing shit out of people's homes will have the effect of making them less sympathetic to your cause. They already don't like us.

1. We DO have a large armed forces. Just because it's nowhere near as large as that of the USA doesn't mean that it isn't large in terms of capacity and technology compared to, oh, I don't know, the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF OTHER STATES. What's more, we do intervene without the say so of the US. Three words: Sierra Leone. Libya.

This isn't abstraction. If the US is a solitary Western actor, it puts them entirely in control of practical considerations in the brokering of peace agreements, gives a much stronger message to civilians and enemy combatants that it is "the American imperialists" intervening instead of, you know, the international community legitimately acting to stop horrible people.

2. They don't like ISIS either, because they're slaughtering their families. Air-strikes, supported by Kurdish forces with our weapons and strategic assistance can and already are starting to, hold back ISIS on the Northern frontier. And yes, the Iraqi army won't become competent overnight. But ask yourself this: is it better to stand by and do nothing while ISIS capture Baghdad and set their sights a little further, leading to a full-on Caliphate fighting Saudia Arabia, and at that a Caliphate bordering NATO, or to give the Iraqi Government at least *SOME* chance of mustering a moderately competent defence force? Doing nothing has a catastrophic price.

3. Mounting a half dozen Tornados in Akrotiri speaks volumes of a military already broken.

This isn't an answer.

As to the rest, the original UN force in Bosnia was already a liberal intervention, it was a complete farce and a great many people who shouldn't be dead, are. It didn't just become a liberal intervention when the UN took the brakes of the western forces in '95. and that 'liberal intervention' was a bloody mess for 3 years.

Peacekeeping troops are not a meaningful military intervention. One word: Rwanda. They are an apology for it. Bosnia proves that sometimes you need to use overwhelming force to regain control of these situations and that it is often effective from the air, especially against an enemy with significant miltiary hardware rather than, say, a guerilla force like Hamas.

There is no victory in Libya. We deposed Ghaddafi, we didn't actually make anything better, there is no ceasefire, no stable government. We just went in there like olympian gods who'd been offended by Ghaddafi's hubris and tipped events against him. Plenty of basically innocent people who happened to be on his side will still die in a war that we decided he was the bad guy in, and to hell with the rest. It was an intervetion in the same way as a pint glass into a bar fight. You might tip the balance, but the fight goes on, someone is getting their head kicked in and your out the pub without particularly caring who it is.

A bar fight that's a fair fight and which doesn't have one side with the capacity for extreme genocide is a better bar fight than one that does. That's partial success. It's not about "victory".

marginally less on what time scale. These things don't happen in isolation, they have an impact on subsequent events.

You are talking about a doctrine of when to get involved, not a strategy of what to do when your there.

I have given you a clear explanation of what the strategy is and how air-strikes aim to, and already are, starting to achieve it.