There’s an eerie sense of dé·jà vu about the western bombing campaign against the Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria.
Had we not been there before, we might conceivably be persuaded by the grave commander-in-chief pose of Obama, the grainy black-and-white videos of direct hits on what look like Lego blocks and the war hype dished up by the fatally gullible American media.
But we have been there before – and we know how it ends. The cruise missiles are the same cruise missiles and the bombers the same bombers. The global security and western values that the campaign is supposedly defending are the same ones that were left in tatters the last time around.
Not even the enemy is new. The jihadist group calling itself Islamic State is nothing more than the mutant offspring of America’s rape of Iraq and Afghanistan (with a grope of Pakistan in the process) a decade-plus ago. Like Hamas in Palestine, Islamic State is nature’s way of saying: You fucked up.