THE UK Parliament last week voted to bomb the Arabs who are fighting the Arabs we almost voted to bomb last summer.

No, even I couldn't make this up.

After a seven-hour debate, the Commons voted 524-43 in favour of air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq but not in Syria.

The SNP voted no, and good for them.

The Chilcot Report on Tony Blair's illegal 2003 Iraq war still remains under wraps three years after it was scheduled to be published, yet we're back there just five years after leaving Iraq wrecked and with our tails between our legs (which has become a familiar pose for No10's American poodle).

Chilcot can start a 2014 report right now, because the conclusions of government incompetence will likely be the same.

We're being told UK involvement in the fight against IS could last for years, and they haven't a clue how it is meant to end.

The intervention of the West has left death, destruction and chaos in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria.

We still haven't defeated Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and IS seem better equipped and trained than both.

Britain is in the grip of the worst austerity in living memory yet we can always find the money to follow the Yanks to war.

We're supplying the token gesture of six Tornados operating from their base in Akrotiri, Cyprus.

Six.

The Red Arrows have more planes than the RAF.

It costs £33,000-an-hour to fly a Tornado. Their Storm Shadow precision bombs are £2million-a-pop, submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles a mere £1m each. What would the NHS do with some of that cash?

All sides have conceded that air strikes will not defeat IS and no-one can deny that indiscriminate bombing with its inevitable civilian casualties will achieve nothing but produce even more Jihadis.

Anyway, the oil-drenched Saudi Arabians are reported to have 600 fighter aircraft, hundreds bought from the UK. Why do they need our six, if not to divert Muslim anger?

Barack Obama and David Cameron justify their intervention because western civilians were beheaded, but hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are being tortured or slaughtered across the world without a thought from the West.

Extremism is flourishing not just in the Middle East but also from Nigeria to Algeria, from the Philippines to Pakistan. Will we be bombing them every time a British citizen is threatened there?

Would it not have been more humane, and considerably cheaper, to have paid the ransoms, as other countries did?

At the very least warn British civilians they visit such places at their own risk.

The perennial suspicion is that the US is not so much concerned with fighting extremism thousands of miles from its own borders than in protecting their own regional interests.

As well as Belgium, Denmark, France, Australia, Holland and the UK, the US coalition mounting air strikes includes Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

All five are dictatorial hereditary monarchies that "discourage" democracy, free speech and human rights.

They regard the West with contempt but since the collapse of the Arab Spring and the rise of IS they are once again pulling America's chain.

The Saudis and other gulf states have for years served their own agenda by bankrolling extremist groups that in turn radicalised young Muslims across the world and spawned the rise of IS.

Notable by their absence meantime from their unholy alliance are Iran and Turkey.

Shia Iran is hated and feared by the Saudi Sunnis, while Turkey's dilemma is the West's arming of the Kurdish Pershmaga in Iraq.

Turkey is home to millions of disaffected Kurds and they fear those weapons and any seized back from IS will be turned on them one day in a fight for independence.

We talk of arming so-called moderate rebels, but is there any such thing in the Middle East as a moderate? It seems to me some are just moderately less mental than others.

The danger for the British Government will be in allowing themselves to be railroaded into "mission creep", and extending our involvement beyond merely air strikes.

That can only mean sending in troops, or special forces to destroy specific targets, and even before the bombing is seen to have minimal effect we are hearing American politicians and generals calling for a ground offensive.

It's true that defeating IS will be achieved only by troops, but what's offensive is the notion that any operation should include British squaddies. There are already boots on the ground in huge numbers, more than enough to obliterate Islamic State's estimated 30,000 fighters.

Iran, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all border Iraq and Syria and can muster among them more than two million troops.

Turkey alone has Nato's second-largest armed forces after America. Leave them to it. They don't need us.