The United States and its NATO allies, including Canada, are embarking on an attempt to remake the Middle East – or, rather, to unmake that which has been remade.
Wednesday night, U.S. President Barack Obama will explain to his countrymen why his country and others will attempt to defeat the Islamic State movement, which has taken over a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq, creating a fanatical Sunni regime.
With military swiftness and a savage ideology, the Islamic State became the dominant force opposing the Syrian government, and set the Iraqi army to flight. That army, on which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization now places considerable faith, literally disappeared from the battlefield, leaving behind its modern weapons for the Islamist forces.
The Americans will now try, with the help of others, to restore the territorial integrity of both Iraq and Syria – without sending in ground troops of their own, an ambition that exceeds the chosen means.
They will count on air power and the armies of the Kurdish and Shia portions of Iraq for a military effort that must last a long time and offers very long odds of success. To this unfolding venture, Canada has already committed several dozen special-operations troops, vague promises of further help and a highly publicized (in Canada) trip to Baghdad by Foreign Minister John Baird and two opposition party critics, during which Canada pledged political fidelity and a little financial support to a deeply corrupt government in a deeply divided country.
Even if the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), is pushed back militarily, it's likely that Syria's civil war will continue to rage and Iraq will continue to be beset by political instability.
These somewhat artificial states, carved out by secret Anglo-French manipulations after the First World War, were held together by autocrats and cabals. One autocrat, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, is gone. Another, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, remains.
The Islamic State has exploited power vacuums in both countries, as well as fierce religious animosities. Outsiders barely understand these schisms, but will be expected to navigate them in the months and years ahead, now that they've plunged back into the region.
Colin Powell, who was U.S. secretary of state under president George W. Bush, once remarked (referring to Iraq) that if you break the crockery, you own it. What supporters of the 2003 invasion hoped to own was a grateful Iraqi populace and a government committed to power-sharing among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
None of those hopes was realized, because Americans, as is their wont, assumed that their norms and values would be embraced by others without experience living with them. Instead, the majority Shiites, suddenly in power in Baghdad, excluded and persecuted the previously ruling Sunnis. The Kurds, seeing the weakening of the Iraqi state, reach in to grab control of territory and power they had long coveted. That they can co-exist happily now strains credulity.
Mr. Bush's administration justified that war with, among other lies, the idea that al-Qaeda had influence and exercised power in Iraq. Today, the Islamic State controls great swaths of Sunni territory in Iraq. It is more ruthless, and certainly better organized, than al-Qaeda ever was.
As Patrick Cockburn recently wrote in the London Review of Books (and as Mr. Harper, Mr. Baird and anyone else interested in the travails ahead should read): "For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of ISIL and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and better organized than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden."
To these complications must also be added the assorted ambitions of the Iranians, the Saudis, the Qataris and to a lesser extent the Turks, who play favourites among the factions in Syria and Iraq, and resort to duplicitousness with outsiders when it suits their purposes, which is often.
With dubious populaces at home, regional allies of uncertain commitment, evident gaps between means and ambitions, and unfocused long-term objectives, we will try to remake that which has already been remade.