Is Australia entering a war without end?

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/is-australia-entering-a-war-without-end-20140918-10iaau.html



Is Australia entering a war without end?
September 20, 2014
Joseph Camilleri

The tragedies unfolding in Syria, Gaza and Iraq are deeply disturbing, but so is the bloodletting in Egypt and the anarchy and violence now gripping Libya. Each conflict has its own timelines, causes and consequences, but they are interconnected. In the West, governments and media generally are fixated on the threat posed by the self-styled Islamic State. Yet, little is said about how violence in one context can easily feed violence in another.

The IS threat, in the making for more than a decade, is the symptom of a deeper ailment to which actions by the United States – notably military interventions, the "war on terror" and the West's confused relationship with the Muslim world – have greatly contributed.

IS is one of the many groups to have sprung up over the past 10 to 15 years as offshoots of al-Qaeda's brand of "militant jihadism". Soon after the US invasion in March 2003, a number of al-Qaeda fighters relocated from Afghanistan to Iraq. Presenting themselves as leading warriors against the infidel occupation and defenders of the Sunni cause, they unleashed an unrelenting series of suicide and conventional attacks against coalition forces and their domestic allies.

This maelstrom eventually gave birth in October 2006 to the precursor of IS, the Islamic State of Iraq. The brutality of its attacks and its deliberately sectarian strategy, including a series of bombings of Shia mosques, were intended to make the country ungovernable. US forces responded by launching a full-scale campaign against the al-Qaeda insurgency, aided by several Sunni groups that had grown weary of al-Qaeda's indiscriminate attacks.