In the novel 1984 there is a perpetual war against an unseen enemy which changes from time to time. So it is with the War Against Terror, which is a war against an abstract noun.

Before the invasion of Iraq, there were no fundamentalist Islamic groups in Iraq. Today IS control large chunks of Iraq, including its second city Mosul.

At home there has been a massive increase in domestic surveillance with Theresa May’s Snoopers Charter in the pipeline. All to protect us of course. Nearly a year after the US started bombing, IS is once again on the rampage, having captured Ramadi.

In Syria the US and Britain are bombing IS with even fewer results. At the same time we are in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf Emirates which have been funding and supplying the same terrorist groups. Saudi Arabia is the spider at the centre of the fundamentalist web, a state which has beheaded about 100 people so far this year. As Patrick Cockburn’s book ‘The Rise of Islamic State’ shows, Saudi and Gulf support for IS in Syria has led to their growth in Iraq.

Israel is also giving support to IS. Its main enemy is Iran and Hezbollah. As a senior officer in the Northern Command told Haaretz newspaper ‘the West intervened too early and not necessarily in the right direction.’

In Libya Western bombing enabled the rise of Al Qaeda and various offshoots, who then went and killed the US Ambassador. We installed a sectarian Shi’ite regime in Iraq which has pushed the Sunni population into IS’s hands. There is one obvious lesson. The West should get out of the Middle East.

  • Tony Greenstein is a political activist