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Iraqi officials issued a desperate plea Saturday night for America to provide ground troops, as heavily armed ISIS jihadists came within striking distance of Baghdad.

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Minister John Baird are certainly correct to support Canada’s traditional allies in attacking the Islamic State (IS). It is such an unspeakably odious organization that it is beyond normal political discourse and as many as possible of its active adherents should be killed or otherwise eliminated as quickly as possible. Further, anything that seems to reactivate the Western Alliance, the most successful in world history, is a good thing. It has recently fallen to a somnolent condition even less fearsome than the former “coalition of the willing,” i.e. we’ll do it if we’re threatened ourselves but otherwise we’ll just be happy with a U.S guaranty of our national security. There cannot be any debate that the Islamic State is a sociopathic, genocidal, barbarous outrage to any concept of civilization, and should be physically exterminated. Some effort should be made to reorient surviving prisoners rather than simply executing them, but it is the duty and in the self-interest of all countries to apply the most ruthless and expeditious force available to eliminate this unmitigated evil. It is to the credit of the Green party that its MP, Bruce Hyer, voted with the government, whose motives were perfectly sensibly explained by Messrs. Harper and Baird.