This blog doesn't usually stray into geo-political insights. In fact it's a refuge against it. So much of political discourse today I find ill-informed and shallow, reduced to sound-bites and twitter lines to take. Great issues - immensely complex and accompanied by history hardly anyone bothers to understand - are dealt with in primary colours, simplified and glossed over.

But as I get older, and maybe this is the way of things, I can't see a war I support. I become less gung-ho and spot shallowness and bluster in arguments to blow fellow human beings to smithereens. I suppose the last couple of decades has shown the limits and problems with Western interventionism - civil wars, lawlessness, religious maniacs, a tide of immigration.

So as Parliament debates today the motion to commit British forces (air & logistics & surveillance) to Syria, I can only say, 'Not in my name'. It's an uncertain trumpet, an instinctive pull rather than a factual push, but when you're unsure, killing (and that is what bombing is however precision) is never the answer. The iron law invoked appears to be the law of unintended - and seldom good - consequences.

Of course, I'm an armchair general, my voice carries no weight nor interest from others, I have no palatable solutions to stop the spread of militant Islam, but the rush to war leaves me cold.

Tim