Christians fleeing for their lives? Save them. Yazidis starving on the mountain tops? Give them food. Islamists advancing on Irbil? Bomb them. Bomb their convoys and "artillery" and their fighters, and bomb them again and again until?

Well, the first clue about the timeframe of our latest Middle East adventure came at the weekend when Barack Obama told the world ? in the most disguised "mission creep" of recent history ? that "I don't think we're going to solve this problem [sic] in weeks ? this is going to take time." So how much time? At least a month, obviously. And maybe six months. Or maybe a year? Or more? After the 1991 Gulf War ? there have actually been three such conflicts in the past three-and-a-half decades, with another in the making ? the Americans and British imposed a "no-fly" zone over southern Iraq and Kurdistan. And they bombed the military "threats" they discovered in Saddam's Iraq for the next 12 years.