In For a Penny, In For a Pound

"I'm not going to give a particular timetable. We are going to maintain vigilance."
"All Iraqi communities are ultimately threatened by these barbaric terrorists."
"[Improving Iraq's security situation will] take some time [and is] going to be a long-term project."
"[They are the ones who must solve their nation's problems —] the United States can't do it for them."
"We'll have to evaluate what happens over time."
"As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq. Combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there's no American military solution to the larger crisis there."
"I have approved] targeted American airstrikes to help Iraqi forces break the siege and rescue these [Yazidi] families."
U.S. President Barack Obama

Perhaps there was a premonition, one that may have occurred directly to U.S. President Barack Obama, one of his close advisers or to one among many of the Pentagon's experienced minds that leaving Iraq to the severe ministrations of a man whose personal ambition might be almost as rotund as former dictator Saddam Hussein's, though now wrapped in the presentability of 'democracy' might auger a coming catastrophe resulting from turned tables giving the country's Shiite majority the power that the Sunnis once enjoyed.

Months ago, in response to all signals emanating from a disgruntled Iraqi Sunni population angered over being side-lined by the government of Nouri al-Maliki heralding a breakdown in the country's restive sectarian fabric, Mr. Obama decided it might represent sound judgement to dispatch 800 U.S. military advisers to Iraq. Prime Minister al-Maliki himself had travelled to Washington to request a re-involvement of American military might, reversing his earlier eagerness to see their backs.

The result being a joint operating centre set up in Irbil, northern Iraq, in the stronghold of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan, and a counterpart operation in Baghdad, where the United States had invested a staggering billion dollar-outlay of its most ambitious and staffed diplomatic mission yet. Those operation centres were designed to result in "a platform to act a nimbly as possible", even while in the short term, President Obama saw fit to turn down Mr. al-Maliki's request for arms and involvement-instanter.

That was until it seemed apparent that the courageous determination of the Kurdish Peshmerga was insufficient unto the day in holding back the now better-equipped Islamic State jihadis making full use of the technologically advanced military gifts left behind in Mosul and other armouries where the Iraqi military felt that for them, at that time and that place, 'discretion was the better part of valor', in the face of the Islamist onslaught. They indiscreetly abandoned duty and valor to the fearsome reputation of the ravening jihadi mob.

There would be no U.S. boots on the ground, Mr. Obama assured war-weary America, their relief renewed, that the job their former commander-in-chief had initiated was history, relying on the campaign promises of their new chief to rescue the U.S. military from the dreary bondage of cleaning up their own mess. The clean-up now continues. Released from the straitjacket of Saddam Hussein-inspired fear maintaining order, the Iraqi menace of sectarian hatred and bloodshed was unleashed.

And bred an ever more grotesque Islamist weapon of mass destruction, as an al-Qaeda spin-off whose solutions to challenges to their supremacy became so brutal that even they shuddered away from association. First, the rescue of the Yazidi minority siege, and protection of American personnel in the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil, then the larger project of witnessing Iraq becoming a melting pot of pure unadulterated Islamist terror; a high priority for prevention.

In this photo provided by Mikey Hassan, members of his extended family stop along the side of the road as they flee militants of the Islamic State group, who took over the city of Sinjar, Iraq. U.S. air strikes will be limited to defending American forces and supporting a humanitarian effort to provide food and water to thousands of starving Yazidi refugees who have fled Islamic State militants.(Photo: AP)

So this will be no brief commitment; strike and you're out. While Iraqis and the Kurdish Peshmerga fight on the ground, the United States will command the air. And can it, will it do so without straying into Syrian airspace to finally address the even larger issue of a government destroying its own civil infrastructure and the lives of countless of its citizens, in yet another sectarian conflict reflecting that of Iraq's but to date with more horrific consequences in its scope and breadth?

But of course, Iraq's trajectory into civil breakdown came courtesy of an American invasion, while Syria's did not. Yet look closely enough and there is a distinct link. Jihadis, while targeting their own co-religionists whose misfortune is that they are seen as Muslim misfits following the wrong path, really look abroad to the Great Satan, inspired by the example of the former Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini whose riveting spirals of pure contempt and hatred for America inspired the generations to follow.

President Obama delivers a statement before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 9, 2014, in Washington, D.C.(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images) off to vacation at Martha's Vineyard