President Obama today announced increased military strikes against ISIS. This amounts to extending the current strategy in Iraq of air strikes against ISIS strongholds and providing arms, training and money to ISIS's opponents into Syria. The decision to extend operations into Syria brings in some new players, and the need for a new Coalition of the Willing (or whatever they're calling it this time).
This will no doubt come as welcome news to Tony Abbott who is so desperate for a distraction from everything else his government says and does that he signed us up before the announcement. Tony Abbott knows all about what war in that region means: Goodies verses Baddies.
We all know who the baddies are, ISIS's reputation is well deserved, but no mention of the unscrupulous bastards who fund them with more than $US1 million per day by purchasing oil on the black market. Stopping ISIS's main source of funding would be a much more effective way of defeating them, but where's the fun in that?
So who are the good guys? Well obviously the countries that make up the Coalition. So far that's Team America, Team Australia and now Team Saudi Arabia. Yes the Saudis, who in the 21 months between James Foley's abduction and his brutal and widely publicised murder beheaded 113 people for crimes which included blasphemy, drug smuggling, sedition and sorcery. According to Amnesty International most people sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia confess to their crimes under torture. The country that gave us Osama Bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers has agreed to provide bases for training Anti-ISIS Syrian rebels.
Of course that's "moderate" groups they'll be training. Most of the Syrian rebels who are fighting against ISIS are affiliated with Al Qaeda and nobody's bothered to find out whether the handful of non-Al Qaeda affiliated groups are moderate or not but hey, they can't all be extremists can they? Only time will tell, I'm sure we'll all know a lot more about them in about 10 years time when we go to war with them.