How the Westminster hawk became an endangered species

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[/audioplayer]There is a slight whiff of the summer of 1914 to Westminster at the moment. The garden party season is in full swing and the chatter is all about who is up and who is down. In the Commons chamber itself, domestic political argument dominates. You would not know that a vicious sectarian war is raging in the Middle East. At the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the fall of Mosul to the terrorist group ISIS, no one asked David Cameron to explain the government’s policy on Iraq.

The situation in Iraq is dire on both a humanitarian and a strategic level. ISIS, an organisation so extreme that even al-Qa’eda criticises its tactics, gleefully posts pictures of the mass graves of the Shi’ite soldiers that it has slaughtered. It is opposed by an Iraqi government that is increasingly sectarian and has invited an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander to Baghdad to oversee the defence of the capital.