As we fret about Syria, the Islamic State is moving into Libya

What is it about war that makes normally sensible politicians prone to hype and exaggeration? No10 is today briefing that Cameron has instructed the RAF to ‘decapitate’ the leadership of the Islamic State in Syria – as if the thought hasn’t occurred to the Americans, who have spent the last 17 months (and $11 million-a-day) bombing Isil positions in Raqqa. ‘We’ve got to go out and kill the bastards,’ the Prime Minister is quoted as saying. An admirable sentiment: the Islamic State is as barbarous a group the Middle East has ever known, so there should be no qualms about striking it. The only problem is whether we do so as an act of anger, or whether we do with a strategy and a purpose. My concern about the Syrian campaign is that it is, primarily, the former.

There’s a simpler, more powerful (and less dramatic) reason for the RAF to bomb Syria, which I looked at it in