Hallelujah! Barack Obama has finally come up with a strategy for dealing with the Islamist fanatics in Iraq and Syria. Two weeks after the most laid-back president in American history said he had no strategy for dealing with Islamist menace, on the eve of the 9/11 attacks he finally managed to make a statement on his plans for dealing with Isil.

The only problem is that it is not going to work. The American president's psychological aversion to putting boots on the ground - a condition that is also prevalent in Whitehall - effectively means that Washington is farming out responsibility for tackling the extremists to local proxies - in Iraq the Kurds' Peshmerga fighters and Iranian-backed Shia militias, in Syria the hopeless Western-backed opposition groups that have so far singularly failed to make any impact whatsoever in Syria's brutal civil war.

All that America and its allies will be doing is bombing Islamist positions in Iraq and Syria without getting their hands dirty on the ground.

You don't need a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies to recognise that this is not only a recipe for disaster, but it will not deliver the stated objective of destroying Isil.

Firstly, could someone at the White House kindly explain how backing pro-Iranian Shia militias in Iraq squares with supporting anti-Assad rebels in neighbouring Syria? Iran, you might remember, is backing the Assad regime, so we already have a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Obama doctrine - in Iraq we are with the Iranians, in Syria we are against the Iranians. Furthermore, Mr Obama's claim that he can bomb Syrian air space without first asking permission of the country's elected government - a position that is supported in London - is a clear breach of international law, a fact I am sure the Russians will seek to raise at the UN Security Council.

Then there is the moral bankruptcy of a policy which relies on others to do your dirty work for you. Isil poses a direct threat to American and British interests, and it is therefore the duty of those governments to take the appropriate action to protect their citizens. Outsourcing that responsibility to other groups might be politically expedient, but it is unlikely to provide the long-term stability and security that they deserve.