Many millions of people have strong views with regards to the current situation in the Middle East and the more it ploughs on the stronger our views and emotions are getting. I personally feel enraged at how western leaders and people just point fingers at each other like bickering toddlers "He started it!" "No; he did!" (You catch my drift), now we are seeing IS take a strong hold on Iraq and Syria many people are just pointing their fingers at Blair & Bush, with them being the obvious scapegoats and all. I however have a different view, the fact that sectarianism is rife within the world's two major religions, being Islam and Christianity (in case you didn't already know that). There will always be these civil or Holy wars within religious states run by, guess what? Sectarian government's intent on belittling the opposing sect or party and enforcing their sectarian views on the whole population.
I think if religion stayed out of politics then we wouldn't see so much extremism on the whole. This is what is happening in Iraq now, not as a result of the US-UK invasion to topple Saddam Hussein who deserved everything he got for ruining the lives of the people he was supposed to protect. They are much better off without him and if you don't believe it then ask an Iraqi yourself, I did.
We must also note Saddam was a Sunni Muslim in a country with a majority Shia population. Note that they now have democratic elections the population which are predominantly Shia vote for a Shia run government, which has angered the Sunni's who would have largely supported Saddam and are now loosely represented by IS, causing an inevitable uprising. IS; feeling frustrated from their brutal exertions in Syria and getting nowhere with the Assad regime decide to take on Iraq with inhumane savagery.
Truly, I believe an invasion or revolution was on the cards for Iraq with or without our intervention in 2003. After the 2010-2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen, the list goes on. Iraq would have no doubt been included in this list if Saddam had been at the helm. We all know how that would have ended.
I also get angered at western politics due to the fact they only seem to intervene when oil prices are at stake. We intervened in Libya because Gaddafi had oil, Iraq was important because it has huge oil reserves and if any other country with oil gets in a pickle over internal fighting or extremism, guess who will be there to save the oil? We have managed to stay out of Syria because there is nothing for the west to gain from getting involved, which is the same for Tunisia, Egypt and all the other countries who can't affect international oil prices by being at war or having the ability to cut of reserves to the western world. Believe me if IS got the oil fields in Southern Iraq the US and Europe wouldn't be able to get ground troops in quick enough!
It is absolutely imperative that should IS make any more gains in Iraq or continue with their ethnic cleansing against the Iraqi minorities then it will become a necessity for the West to step in with military action on a much more aggressive scale. However I do agree that we must also get the Iraqi army fighting back, after all IS has roughly 10,000 militants in Iraq compared to Iraq's 880,000 strong army. I'm no expert in military strategy but at 88-1 I would fancy my chances with Western backing.
If we continue to feed this monster it will become much more problematic to defeat. Our leaders and the public who oppose military intervention now will only be repeating the mistakes we made in the 1930's by not stopping the Nazis before they became too powerful to stop quickly and effectively causing catastrophic loss of life totaling 60 million civilians and soldiers.
I have to ask the questions, will there ever be peace in the Middle East? Will the extremists ever disappear? And how do we get them to disappear without fighting back? I don't really have any permanent answers or solutions but I think in a turbulent world which has never been any different except for the fact that now the media are able to incite hatred and fear into us on a daily basis, we have to accept that peace is a long way off for the Middle East and deal with these situations the best we can as they come along. All we and they can do is progress one day at a time. After all look how far we have come since the world was flat.