How is Canada’s war in Iraq and Syria going? I put that question to veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk.

His answer: Badly.

Fisk is Middle East correspondent for Britain’s Independent newspaper. He’s been covering the region for more than 35 years. Based in Beirut, he goes regularly into Syria. Earlier this year, he spent nine days travelling along the front lines of that country’s bitter civil war.

Right now, he’s on a whirlwind, cross-country lecture tour organized by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. On Thursday, he’ll be speaking in Toronto. I caught up with him by phone earlier this week in Victoria, B.C.

Fisk calls the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria “preposterous.” America, Canada and other nations taking part claim to be targeting so-called command and control centres of the Islamic State (ISIS). But in this war, he says, such centres simply don’t exist.

“I don’t think the U.S. is serious,” he says. “Very occasionally, you can hear the rumble of American bombs. But they’re certainly not having much effect.”

Nor is he optimistic about Western efforts to train Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian ground forces to fight the Islamic State.

Persuading locals to fight the West’s wars is a traditional strategy in the Middle East, he notes. But this one isn’t working.

Iraqi Kurds, including those trained by Canadian soldiers, have held their ground. But they have not been able to make major advances against ISIS.

Attempts to arm and train so-called Syrian moderates have flopped miserably. A top U.S. general admitted to Congress last week that after a year’s effort, only “four or five” American-armed moderate rebels are still left fighting ISIS in Syria.

The aim had been to train 5,000.

How do we deal with ISIS then? Fisk doesn’t claim to know all the answers. Nor does he claim to fully understand ISIS, which he calls a “cult, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”

But he does say the solution lies in the geo-politics of the region and the four-year-old Syrian civil war.

The roots of that civil war began when thousands of the country’s rural poor, dispossessed of their land by drought and inept government policy, began to migrate into the suburbs of major cities like Damascus.

It was volatile mixture that eventually exploded into a social revolution pitting the poor against the urban middle class.

At about the same time, the U.S. was beginning to rethink its approach to the Middle East. Before he was deposed in 1979, the Shah of Iran had been America’s key proxy in the region. The installation of a Shiite anti-American government in Tehran forced Washington to rely exclusively on Sunni dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia.

But the 9/11 attacks, followed by the war against Afghanistan’s Taliban, caused some in the upper echelons of American foreign policy to rethink the country’s Middle East strategy.

Both Al Qaeda and the Taliban had been nurtured ideologically on Saudi Arabia’s strict Wahabi version of Sunni Islam. Fisk speculates that America is getting ready to draw away from Sunni Gulf states and instead re-forge its historic ties with Shiite Iran.

This is the context for the spectacular and unexpected rise of yet another Wahabi-inspired fighting group — ISIS.

To Fisk, ISIS is not an ideological movement, however misguided. Rather, it is an emotionless machine — a weapon designed to counter any American shift toward Shiite Iran.

Whose weapon? He didn’t exactly answer that question. But he did say that peace can come only when Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar make clear to ISIS that the game is over.

As for the Syrian civil war that is driving the current refugee crisis in Europe, Fisk reckons that Russia, Iran and the U.S. are already trying to work out a deal.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad will probably be allowed to stay in power for a while. The key to ending the violence inside Syria, however, will be a massive reconstruction effort involving aid to the dispossessed.

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In the meantime, he says, the U.S.-led war to which Canada is contributing serves no useful purpose.

“Abandon it,” he says. “It’s not doing any good.”

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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