I hope you will vote in Parliament against this, unless there is a Security Council resolution in favour of international military intervention. The classic conditions for a ‘just war’ do not seem to me to have yet been met. Violence and killing people (including, inevitably, innocent civilians) must be a last resort.

In any case, enough damage has already been caused by unilateral Western meddling in this part of the world, which it is so easy for the Islamists to portray as either a ‘crusade’ or as neo-imperialism to protect our oil. Why do we need to follow the Americans’ foolish lead? I have not seen a plausible account of what the ‘success criteria’ for any action would be (except that , whatever they are, they could take years to fulfil) , and there is a clear danger of mission creep. ISIL may say they want to carry their jihad to Britain and other Western countries, but in practice their prospects of being able to do this on any substantial scale cannot be very large. So bombing Iraqis or Syrians would, in my view,be a disproportionate response to a comparatively small threat to our national interests