A Simple Explanation...

[threegee]

British foreign policy in the Middle East is really rather simple...

 

We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don't like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.

 

We don't like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

 

We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

 

If the people we want to defeat are defeated they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren't actually there until we went in to drive them out.

 

I nicked this from may2015.com but think they nicked it from some other publication. It's credited to Aubrey Bailey, from Fleet in Hampshire.

 

I suspect there's a similar extremely simple explanation of present-day UK foreign policy toward Russia.  Anyway, bring back the Cold War when everyone knew where the nuke was due in from, and we all had an approximate idea of who our allies were.