David Cameron may now have his bombing mandate, but he still has no strategy. The PM’s ‘hope for the best’ rhetoric yesterday was distinctly un-Churchillian: ‘I know that will take a long time and that it will be complex,’ he said, ‘but that is the strategy, and we need to start with the first step, which is going after these terrorists today.’
It is not much of a plan, and those in the know know it: from defence chiefs – some of them friends of mine – giving anonymous briefings, to Parliament’s own foreign affairs committee, and even the voters, whom polls show swinging ever further away from air strikes.
They are right to be sceptical. The vagueness of the plans was shown in the references to Iraq. Cameron was right to say that British jets can perform a unique function: the Brimstone missile is indeed a precision weapon other allies, Saudi Arabia excepted, do not possess.
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