Tony Abbott hopes for a good, quick, cheap war in Iraq. But after the first few weeks of bombing everyone now understands that western air strikes alone will do little to "degrade and destroy" the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. They will only be defeated on the ground. That will require very large land forces, committed for a very long time, and accepting heavy casualties.
Most of those forces are supposed to come from the Iraqi Army and "moderate" factions in Syria's civil war, both of which have already been soundly beaten by IS. The hope is that weapons, training and advice from the US-led coalition will transform them into crack troops who can turn the tables on IS and win the war for us.
This is not a new idea. For half a century America and its allies have been trying to win messy civil wars without fighting themselves and by training and equipping one side or the other. It never works. We need only recall Afghanistan, where we have just spent many billions of dollars and quite a few lives over almost a decade, trying and failing to create effective, pro-western security forces that could beat the Taliban. Or Iraq, where an equally massive effort produced the Iraqi Army, whose dismal performance allowed IS to seize so much of Iraq in the first place. Or Vietnam.
There are deep reasons for these failures. Making good soldiers is a very complex business. A few days "instruction" by a foreigner who doesn't even speak their language does not do it. As IS itself shows, civil wars are not won by better weapons or technical skills, but by stronger motivation and morale. Foreign advisers cannot supply that.
This means that Barack Obama's current campaign against IS is almost certain to fail. So what are the alternatives? The best would be to secure large-scale support from the major regional powers who have most at stake in the future of Iraq and Syria. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have the forces and resources to defeat IS if they choose to use them. But they do not share Obama's strategic objectives in the region, and they are bitter rivals themselves. They will not follow America's leadership.
That seems to leave only one option - to commit US and coalition land forces to fight and defeat IS on the ground themselves. Many people already believe we should do this, and their numbers will grow. Already the counter-insurgency experts are calling for a coalition ground campaign. But we should be under no illusion what that would mean. A few thousand Western troops will not make any real difference. Many, many more would be needed.
To see why, we need first to understand that that the current campaign objective makes no strategic sense. Simply destroying IS would do little if anything to remove the dangers that events in Iraq and Syria now pose to countries like America and Australia. New groups like IS will continue to emerge as long as these civil wars rage. The dangers we fear will be removed only when a new stable political order can be established in this region.
America and its allies would only be able to lead that process, or even influence it much, by deploying huge land forces for a very long time indeed. Any serious chance of success would require a military and political commitment both much bigger and probably much longer than the one that followed America's invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And, of course, that is not going to happen. It is not just that America and its allies lack the will to take up that kind of burden again. They lack the resources, including the armed forces. Western militaries are just not big enough for the job, even if they didn't have other things to worry about – and they do.
This, then, is the problem at the heart of the campaign against IS. It is easy to agree that IS poses a terrible threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and a significant risk to countries much further away. But any effective military campaign against IS would require immense resources. So it is not enough to say that IS is evil and dangerous. We have to decide whether the risks that IS poses are great enough to justify the costs of a campaign that would have any realistic chance of removing it. And the answer is no.
That being so, the campaign we have joined is doomed to fail, and should not have been launched. There is no point launching a campaign if the objectives do not warrant the costs required to achieve them.
President Obama himself probably understands this, which is why he was so reluctant to commit forces until now. The only question is whether he admits failure soon, before the costs mount too high, or sets off down a path of slowly escalating commitment in the hope that just a bit more effort will somehow bring success.
This painful process soon takes on a momentum of its own. It takes much longer and costs even more, but produces the same result in the end. And history suggests, that this path is the more likely. It is what Obama is already being urged to do.
Abbott should be thinking carefully about this. He hopes and expects that his new commitment to Iraq can be limited to the relatively low-cost and low-risk deployments he has authorised so far. But that was what John Howard believed when he first committed Australia to Afghanistan in 2001. When our allies increase their commitment, we soon did the same.
If Obama is persuaded to commit more forces against IS, Abbott's war in Iraq could soon look a lot like Afghanistan. As our commitment slowly escalated, that war lasted much longer and cost much more – including 40 lives - than anyone at first imagined, before we finally withdrew without achieving any of our objectives. How quickly we seem to have forgotten that.
Hugh White is a Fairfax columnist and professor of strategic studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.
Their freedom to take away freedom be damned. I'm definitely polarized against it. Its totalitarian, so if I need to align with some hard-line against it, I will.
.. Just south of London..
