Tony Abbott makes a hash of Middle East intervention

Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.

The vehicles usually pull up at intersections around lunch, when the squares are busiest. Some armed men tumble out, bundling their captive with them, while another begins braying from a loudspeaker. "Come! Look! Watch!" he commands, and reads out the court's sentence. Anyone attempting to leave risks punishment.

And then the sentence is carried out. Smoking – caning. Shaving beards too closely – public lashing. Failure to pray five times a day – imprisonment. Theft – cutting off hand and foot. And enemies of the Islamic State are decapitated, with the offender's head left impaled on a spike at the place of execution. Nobody dares remove the gristly reminder.

But this is neither Islam nor the rule of law. There is no morality involved in publicly caging a Jordanian Sunni pilot, dousing him in fuel, then filming as he burns. Nor in mass-executions of people wearing orange-jumpsuits in some bizarre imitation of the US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. Or in teaching children how to behead people using dolls. Or in the spread of random acts of terror.

This is simply evil; abhorrent to any civilised person. Nor in their treatment of women as second-class people. And so, thus far, we must stand alongside Tony Abbott. He has correctly identified the horrific problem. Perhaps you may not choose to endorse all his rhetoric, particularly his simplicity in labelling IS a "death cult" and the way he appears to import conflicts from the Middle East and attempt to find Australian parallels, but that's not the point. The real issue is that our PM is proving incompetent at the task he gave himself: defeating IS. Nothing he's done has stopped the horror and this is the real tragedy. Abbott is – and this is critical – now loosing the war that he originally insisted we needed to fight.

Look at the growth of IS. We've heard, time and time again, about how Iraqi forces are "preparing" an offensive to retake the area just north of the Baghdad and US-trained brigades are involved in this task. But it never happens. And the people we've trained? Our Defence force will only vouch for the fact the units that we've been training could "potentially participate in operations". Huh? What have our forces been doing and is this all they have accomplished? Creating "potential".

Yet perhaps even just this is better than the easily-accessible internet video that shows a previous unit we were working with, the black-clad counter-terrorism service, fleeing towards the capital. Nobody's saying that our troops' mission is easy, but they certainly don't appear to have had any effect on the battlefield.

Meanwhile our pilots are still flying out of a base near the entrance to the Arabian Gulf, which requires the expenditure of huge amounts of time and fuel just to get near their operational area. The Iraqis won't even allow our aircraft to be based in the country we are supposedly helping. And then, once our jets have flown for hours to arrive over the targets they are only allowed to attack targets in Iraq, and not Syria, even though they are the same enemy. This is utter idiocy. The same IS terrorist is, somehow, anathema in and to be destroyed but only when they're fighting Baghdad. This doesn't make sense.

Humanitarian concerns alone demand the same standard is applied to this conflict. Abbott may dislike Syria's government, but is he seriously suggesting that it remains as thoroughly evil as IS? He needs to follow his own logic. There is no excuse, however, for his pretending the international border between the two countries makes any sense as a demarcation line for attacking and destroying Islamic State. If it is, as he insists, a "death cult" it deserves to be destroyed wherever it resides, and not just where convenient.

Turkey's role is vital in this regard. Forget about training the Iraqi forces: IS will not be destroyed unless Ankara is determined on this course of action. The last fortnight has seen Turkey finally taking some action to deal with the crisis on its borders. The tragedy is that it appears to be attacking the Kurds with the same relish it's taking on Islamic State. So far no ground troops seemed to have been involved in this action, and it's only aircraft that have been sent to bomb likely targets.

Once again, it's difficult to attempt to understand exactly what Turkey's objective might be. It's certainly not to establish an independent and strong Kurdish state on its southern border, and nor do its actions seem to spring from any desire to crush IS. As we get closer to the scene of the conflict it becomes more and more apparent that the simple moral questions and answers that we in the West engage with are irrelevant or inappropriate in the Middle East. If they are to be resolved these equations will require more sophisticated engagement; they're not amenable to being reduced to simple formulas of good and evil.

And that's why Abbott is currently flunking a far more severe test then whether or not  Bronwyn Bishop should have ever been appointed Speaker, or whether our politicians are ripping-off allowances. There is an existential struggle currently taking place in the Middle East. Our troops are deployed and yet it's difficult, if not impossible, to see that they have achieved anything at all. The enemy the Prime Minister insisted we had to engage with has become more powerful and stronger since he first urged our involvement.

Abbott is turning into that most dangerous of creatures – a failure as a war PM. 

Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.

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