West Needs To End Dithering Over Jihadists

It's bulldozed one border and has its eyes on many more.

As it carves the world into an image of its own creation the Islamic State has shown the West's foreign policy leaders to be ostriches - determined not to see the obvious.

Now that they have plucked their heads out of the ground and shaken off the sand there are signs that the need for policy is coming dimly into focus.

A Kurd of the ethnic minority of Yazidis holds up a placard in Germany

But what could it be?

The IS has made its own agenda very clear. It intends to sweep away the artificial notions of modern states in the Middle East.

They were established in the region following a 1917 colonial agreement between Britain and France known as Sykes-Picot - after its authors.

It now controls a third of Syria and the same amount of Iraq, renaming the landscape The Islamic Caliphate.

One option for the West is to work with the Kurdish Peshmerga troops

It has its eyes on Lebanon, northern Iraq, and in the end would love to establish a new Islamic empire that recreates the golden era of Islamic influence and rule which extended into southern Europe.

Perhaps even with its capital in Constantinople (modern Istanbul).

Al Qaeda has had the same idea for decades. But it's the IS that has exploited sectarian divisions and global paralysis on how to deal with them.

Its success has grown, partly, out of dithering on Syria.

US fighter jets have already conducted strikes in Iraq

Experts warned that if the largely secular and pro-democratic early uprising against Bashar al Assad was not materially supported by the West in 2011 then radical Islamists would fill that need. They were not, and it did.

Syria rapidly collapsed into a battle between Shia and Sunni. Assad's regime supported by Shia Iran, while the Islamists were Sunni groups supported by private donors in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic State (then calling itself ISIS), grew out of this conflict - seizing most of Syria oil fields and focusing on building its own strength and numbers rather than fighting Assad.

It then swung into Iraq where it's leaders had cut their teeth in the insurgency against the US-led occupation.

Shi'ite volunteers have joined the Iraqi army to fight against extremists

It added former Baathist staff officers trained under Saddam Hussein, to its ranks.

Intelligence sources and its own annual report demonstrate that it's a meticulously run organism.

It's largely encircled the Iraqi capital, Baghdad while its online propaganda now also threatens attacks in the West.

The West could leave the history of the Middle East to take its natural course, for the first time since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The region could then face decades of convulsion while it reforms itself - probably into rival Shia and Sunni blocs - while the West works on containing the contagion of chaos.

Another option is to work through proxies, like the Kurdish Peshmerga, the hapless Iraqi army, and Syrian rebel groups, providing arms and ammunition, training and intelligence, to at least roll back IS gains.

The last, least politically popular, option is direct and sustained military intervention to try to annihilate the fastest growing Islamist franchise before its spreads globally.

It's now a choice as to what is the least bad option. The dithering days are over.

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