British Prime Minister David Cameron had an op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph today spelling out why he thinks ‘ISIS is bad, mmkay‘?

At first glance it looks like a pretty solid stand against the barbarians marauding across the Levant. But in reality, much like everything David Cameron does, it is a lot of fart and not much poop.

Here’s why: 

1. He is obviously being leant on (probably by the U.S. government following his failure on Syria and also by his ministers, and his own ego, natch) to do more with British forces. After the catastrophe of his Libya intervention, Cameron sees this as his Kosovo moment 3.0. The only problem is, it’ll end up like his Kosovo moment 2.0 because as ever, Britain will do things in a half-arsed manner, for PR purposes, instead of trying to actually get the job done.

How obvious does he want to make it that he’ll be committing more resources to Iraq soon (no bad thing in my opinion), but trying to gloss over the failures of the Iraq War, pretending like this fight won’t be just as hard, just as long, and just as bloody. It will be. It simply can’t not be. In other words, another Prime Minister is lying to you about a war in Iraq – is this now a rite of passage?

2. He’s pussyfooting around the radical Islam issue, trying to claim that it is simply a battle of those perverting Islam. It isn’t. A lot of these guys are simply interpreting the Koran the way a lot of Sunnis do. They just simply happen to be acting upon it while most Muslims around the world are more interested in hanging out with their families than hanging their co-religionists from lampposts.

Still, Cameron’s being disingenuous and contradictory. On one hand its “wrong” to think of what ISIS is doing as a religiously motivated thing, and on the other hand he names four other Sunni terror groups wreaking havoc from Africa, all the way across the Middle East. Which is it, Dave?

3. He claims Saudi and Turkey have to help against ISIS. These are the guys supporting them, according to recent reports. It is likely that Turkey sees ISIS as a decent conduit to rid them of their turbulent priests of the PKK, Peshmerga and their allies in Kurdistan. Meanwhile, Saudi quadrillionaires are bankrolling ISIS to high heaven. Does Cameron actually think these countries are going to assist in fighting the extremism that they’ve helped create? If he does, can we ‘impeach’ him or whatever our constitution allows us to do when our leaders have lost their friggin’ minds?

4. He lays the framework for normalisation of relations with Iran, which to be fair has been a long time coming. I was just wondering which issue the government would try and tack this onto the end of, like a pathetic little sub-reveal at the end of a really dreadful movie. 

Yes, it is contrived and nonsensical. Iran remains one of the world’s greatest state sponsors of terrorism – and yet we’re taking the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend approach’? Because as soon as we’ve offed ISIS for Iran, which has been bogged down in Iraq for a while now, they’re not going to turn straight back on us and our allies? Sure, sure. And while we’re being so gracelessly naive why don’t we just hand over our sovereignty to a country that tried to destroy us too. Oh, wait…

5. The only thing good about Cameron’s op-ed was the claim that British police would arrest anyone flying the ISIS flag. But think about this for a second.

Firstly, there’s no consensus on what the ISIS flag is. Is it the black flag with the shahada on it? Is it the one with the seal of the Prophet of Muhammed? 

Either way, can you see a British judge ruling that a Muslim can’t fly a flag with the seal of the Prophet, or one that says ‘There is No God but Allah and Muhammed is the Messenger’? No, nor can I. And not for a second can I see the European Court of Human Rights not handing our arses to us if we dared convict someone of this. So once again – I highly doubt Cameron’s on any stable ground here.

All in all I give the Prime Minister 10 out of 10 for perception. At first he even had me fooled into thinking that he was serious about taking on ISIS and riding Britain of fanatics at the same time.

Alas, I fear whoever ‘bulked out’ the article for him with mentions of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and his grotesque disowning of the War on Terror (which he voted in favour of as an MP, by the way) has sold him down the river. The same river he’s selling us down.