Re: Genuine Question
The saying goes "attack is the best defence" applies universally and throughout history. The root of the problem lies in a nation state sized terrorist organisation occupying a large area of the middle east.
You are David Cameron and I claim my five pounds.
Spending fifteen+ years dropping bombs and removing governments we don't like is the proximate cause of much of the anti-western terrorism. Regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria has ceded much of those countries to violent extremists, and you think more bombing and boots on the ground will solve that? The locals clearly are incapable of any form of stable, democratic, honest, fair government themselves. But you can't impose that by sending in Western forces. That was tried in Iraq, and created the foundations for IS.
Cameron is itching to send our ill-equipped military to join in with the Russians, Americans, French, Jordanians, Canadians, et al, but what good will that do? If the combined air power of the world's two largest militariies plus the support of several other nations hasn't routed or even contained IS, what will sending a few antiquated Tornadoes into battle achieve? The one thing we should have learned from Afghanistan ten years ago was that winning the war is the easy bit, winning the peace is what counts - and in this case we aren't even winning the war.
And finally, liberal western democracies like the idea of a decisive response, yet aren't prepared for the sort of bloody war of extermination that you'd have to undertake to erase a religious death cult like IS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
