The war on terror has gone not necessarily to our advantage. For the second time in a dozen years the land of Abraham has been invaded by a partly-British army, although this time it is composed not of regular soldiers but of bearded lunatics from Crawley.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an Islamist offshoot so extreme that even al-Qaeda thinks they’ve taken things a bit too far, now controls a huge swathe of Syria and Iraq, roughly in the region of 40,000 square miles, or 4.0 Wales on the International Wales Scale. That makes Sunnistan larger than an independent Scotland and with a great deal more oil.
The failure of the Americans to nation-build was epitomised by the fact that a US-trained Iraqi army of 30,000 fled from just 800 ISIS militants in Mosul. Defeatist armies tend to reflect a society with low levels of cohesion and conversely high levels of clannishness and corruption, problems which mar the artificial states created by the French and British after the fall of the Turkish Empire.
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