President Obama may think his Middle East strategy has gone from non-existent to coherent in just a few days, but he would be sorely mistaken. 

His gung-ho message to the American people on Wednesday night was more belligerent bluster than strategic common sense. 

He vows to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the throat-cutting terrorists of Isis by extending the month-long US bombing campaign in Iraq and launching air strikes in Syria for the first time.

Yet the notion that the US can bomb its way to a solution to every perceived problem has already been utterly discredited by the bloody chaos engulfing Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in recent years.

Ah yes, the US Commander in Chief tells us, but this next military intervention will be different. The US will spearhead a coalition of European and Middle East forces without putting in any US ground troops.

Except that we’ve seen such ‘coalitions of the willing’ before. They invariably turn out to be a fig-leaf for US-directed operations which primarily serve US geopolitical and big business interests. 

There is also something deeply incongruous about some of the allies being courted by the White House and the Pentagon. 

The royal dictators in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have done little or nothing to stop their compatriots arming and bankrolling the very Islamic fundamentalists who went to fight in Syria and have now ended up in Isis.

Nato member Turkey allowed these and other foreign jihadists to stream through that country and into Syria in order to try to overthrow the authoritarian but secular regime of President Bashar al Assad in Damascus. 

Moreover, it appears that the Turkish “open borders” policy which did so much to strengthen Isis still operates.

Why, in their frenzy, was this issue not raised publicly at last week’s Nato summit by the participants and their media camp followers? 

Belatedly, the realisation is now dawning among some politicians and military chiefs that the drive by the US and its allies — each for their own reasons — to subvert Syria was a huge mistake. 

The struggle to defeat Isis needs the support of all secular, democratic, left and progressive forces in the region. Violating Syrian sovereignty with unauthorised US air strikes will make that support all the more unlikely. 

As for Obama’s assurances of no US army boots on the ground, the trainers and advisers are already being sent in alongside those US and British “special forces” almost certainly in Iraq already. 

The body bags will still fill up, even though some may be kept as secret as when the British SAS was hired out to shore up the dictatorship in the rotten Gulf state of Oman. 

And nothing will add more lustre to bogus IS claims that it represents Muslims in a holy war against Western imperialism than the direct involvement of US and Nato forces in Iraq and Syria.

That’s why it’s vital to construct an anti-Isis coalition in which the governments of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Syria, Syrian Kurdistan and Lebanon co-ordinate a fight against Isis in the name of equality and respect for all religious, ethnic and national groups in the region. 

That would deserve support from the wider world, legitimised by the United Nations and best channelled through its agencies.