Only a couple of weeks ago, the US president Barack Obama mused in public that he did not yet have a strategy for Syria.



But the non-existent White House strategy has now been superseded by a period of rapid international coalition building. Things are now beginning to escalate, and Australia is moving along with it.

While Sunday’s announcement by Tony Abbott formally committing Australian military assets and 600 defence personnel to an international coalition in northern Iraq is only really a first step: part of prudent pre-positioning and pre-planning, the prime minister is already preparing Australians for a lengthy deployment to the region he often likes to characterise as a “witches’ brew”.

Eleven years after the last Iraq invasion, it’s a case of here we go again. “I have to warn the Australian people that should this preparation and deployment extend into combat operations, this could go on for quite some time – months rather than weeks, perhaps many, many months indeed,” the prime minister said on Sunday.

When it comes to military sorties, it’s a truism that Australia goes where America leads. If America engages, so does Australia.

But the build up to this particular engagement has been somewhat unusual because Abbott has created an appearance, not of riding strategically and dutifully in the American slipstream, but actually being out in front of the Americans in muscling up, rhetorically at least, against Islamic State.

In the weeks where Washington was flat-out declining to commit one way or another – in public at least – Abbott’s language has been colourfully consistent: pushback against the Islamic State “death cult” has been given the character of moral crusade. The prime minister has spent weeks creating a sense of inevitability, domestically, around an intensification of military action in northern Iraq, and possibly in theatres beyond. The “death cult” is threatening the global order. The conflict is “reaching out” to Australia whether we want it to or not.

Australia’s security agencies have also been busy over the past couple of weeks actively downplaying the idea that Australia’s involvement in military action in northern Iraq will heighten any national security risks at home. The Asio rationale is that Australia is already a terror target, so our involvement in military action makes no difference.

Australia is, of course, a terror target. Recent history, tragically, confirms that.

But it also pays to bear a little history in mind. In 2004, the former police chief Mick Keelty argued that Australia put itself at greater risk of terrorism because of its role in Iraq.

Keelty was promptly jumped on by Howard government ministers for his departure from the government line. But history vindicated Keelty’s judgment. MI5 later told the UK’s Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war that the 2003 invasion had substantially increased the threat of terrorist attacks – and also served to radicalise young Muslims.

This looming sortie into northern Iraq is different from the catastrophic adventurism of the 2003 invasion.

There is a clear humanitarian obligation to protect besieged minorities (although this obligation could be also argued in a bunch of places other than Iraq); and there is a defensible imperative to support an inclusive Iraqi government in strategies to safeguard its own internal security and order.

But where this conflict ultimately leads America and the world is really a function of what it is actually about. Right now, at such a nascent stage of proceedings, that’s not entirely clear.

Is it about containing Islamic State? Is it about conducting surgical strikes against militants who might perpetrate acts of global terror? Or is about America (and allies) moving in to adjust the prevailing order of the Middle East once again?

As Steve Coll wrote perspicaciously in The New Yorker last week, the question of resuming war in Iraq in 2014 is not whether or not a new conflict can be justified – but where it will lead.