You jihadst to do it...

Put aside your opinions as to what percentage of the blame can be borne personally by Tony Blair for the current crisis in Iraq – and Ed Miliband might want to note that unlike the cost-of-living campaign this really IS a crisis – and consider that Mad Tony is almost certainly correct in his assertion that only extreme force could have any real impact on ISIS. As for the jihadists themselves they are treading a well-worn and brutal path, in keeping with primitive warrior sects throughout the ages.

It is rumoured that after taking Samarkand, eight hundred years ago, Genghis Khan ordered a pyramid be erected in his honour constructed entirely from the severed heads of conquered civilians, including children. In the fifteenth century, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia of the House of Drăculești, became most famous for the forests of impaled victims he left as a reminder to those who dared challenge him. Idi Amin brutally massacred anywhere between 100,000 and half a million of his own citizens, the corruption and chaos of his regime being largely responsible for the ultimately unknowable final death toll.

Whether through madness or cold calculation people like this are to be excoriated and condemned, but most of all they should be feared precisely because they do not fear us. Having left our own brutal, bloodthirsty past far behind, opting for an ‘all must come home’ model of warfare, wherever possible fought at arm’s length and through oily back room diplomacy, ISIS are correct in their assessment that by the time we do anything it will be far too late. And far too feeble.

Satellite surveillance, drone strikes, sanctions… against a ruthless and fearless enemy that glories in killing – close up, bloody killing - we are at a disadvantage so profound we might be better to just lay down our arms altogether and employ our superior technology instead on doing our best to identify the dead and dying whose names will otherwise be lost to history. Is this where the west ends up, as accountants and scorekeepers for a world ruled by a profoundly brutal medievalism?

Ignoring the dangers of unchecked islam for so many years has put the jihadists in the driving seat – region after region has fallen to the extremists and western observers have been fooled by the lying mask of ‘moderate islam’. There is no such thing, or else if there is, where ARE the noisy demonstrations calling for the kaffir NOT to be beheaded? Where are the burning korans and the stamping into the dirt of islamic flags? Western civilisation has been busy this half-century, burning its own flag… and taking its eye off the prize it created. We have already given our countries away and now we wring our hands in despair as our values are looted, desecrated and burned in front of our eyes.

Yesterday I heard of talks designed to limit Iran’s access to nuclear weapons. The very thought should chill all our bones because unlike in the civilised world – in which Iran once played a part before the rule of the Ayatollahs – nuclear missiles would not be used, as they have been for decades, as a deterrent. They would be tactical weapons of holy fury to be unleashed on a west whose main crime is to be ashamed of its own genuine moral superiority.

The talk in the west is about the options open to us to do… to do what? What do we hope to achieve? To intervene or not to intervene? To fight or to merely mop up the blood stains? But discussions about the choices open to us are mostly futile; when the time comes, islam will give us no choices.