rabble.ca 07/10/2014 - The Harper government's plan to send Canadian air power to help combat the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, and possibly Syria, and for Canadian special forces to continue operating there is homicidal, won't achieve its supposed goals and needs to be opposed. Legislation tabled by the federal government on October 3 says that "unless confronted with strong and direct force, the threat ISIL poses to international peace and security, including to Canadian communities, will continue to grow." There is plenty of evidence to suggest that exactly the opposite is true. James Comey, director of the FBI, told the U.S. Congress that support for IS has increased since the U.S. began the 2014 chapter of its bombing of Iraq. The Guardian puts the number of fighters who have joined IS since the bombing campaign began at 6,000 fighters.
Moreover, there had previously been a split between IS and al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, but the two groups have reconciled in the face of the west's bombing of Syria, which will strengthen both groups and sectarian jihadism more generally. To say that western states should not be bombing Iraq and Syria is not isolationism and neither does it indicate indifference to the thousands in Iraq and Syria that IS has slaughtered, raped, assaulted and ethnically cleansed. Rather, this position is the only tenable one for people concerned with the inhabitants of the region. Many approaches to fighting IS are likely to be more effective than western bombing are available.

CBC News 03/10/2014 - SIS sets the reformist cause back by decades. The war against it ensures not an inch of forward movement. The reform minded must again stand aside as another "existential" battle between their respective states and Islamists once again trumps the desire for change. This is a battle that is not only led by the U.S., but widely supported by governments from Israel to Damascus to Riyadh. In fact rarely in the recent history of the fractious Middle East have so many nations lined up behind a single cause. Many reformists might well agree with this fight, too, now that ISIS has morphed into the threat it is today. But they stand aside knowing there was a way to prevent all this. For years, in a variety of studies, Arab states were reminded time and again of how far behind they had fallen. How dissatisfied their youth had become. How desperately their nations needed political and economic reform. How even extremist Islamists derived more legitimacy with every injustice dealt by the state. But instead of change, they delivered harsher crackdowns. Instead of providing hope they sowed anger and distrust.

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How not to understand ISIS