Following wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and considering recent discourse surrounding the since evolved, enriched and equipped so-called ‘Islamic State’, one might be forgiven for thinking that ‘terror’ has been backed into a corner in northern Iraq.

The enemy is within sight, it seems, and bombing Raqqa has for a while now appeared the next logical step in the campaign to keep us safe. But that’s not exactly the way it is, and that’s not exactly how it works.

In the aftermath of the last month’s massacre of over 130 innocent civilians in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger jet carrying flying over Egypt, killing 200, France and Russia alongside the US have pounded IS strongholds through repeated air strikes.

This week the House of Commons voted to join this aerial offensive. Many Labour Party MPs privately and openly pledged to defy their leader Jeremy Corbyn – who has been against taking military action – and so he reluctantly permitted a free vote on the issue.

By joining in on these airstrikes, we have effectively joined another conflict again without setting clear goals; another war seemingly without an end.

Invasions and interventions in Iraq and Libya have shown us the disastrous consequences of going gung-ho for regime change through force without defining a strategy for sustainable state reconstruction by diplomacy.

What both episodes eventually facilitated were vacuums, opportunities for groups hell-bent on toppling inadequate efforts at peace and spreading hatred, sectarianism and violence.

Whereas Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi headed up long established states and regimes, the threat posed by IS and all it stands for is a lot more dispersed, fluid and unpredictable. The bombing of one location looks increasingly unlikely to demolish the threat posed.

David Cameron has won support of MPs to strike against IS, yet not so long ago both he and US President Barack Obama sought to do so in the opposite direction and to take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Both failed to convince their respective legislatures of the argument to intervene then; events as opposed to strategy seem to have swayed politicians now.

Cameron says the air strikes have already set IS back. Of course they will have: bombing infrastructure and the like would set any militant group back, but this kind of offensive is not likely to wipe ISIL out entirely.

Cameron claims that dismantling the IS propaganda machine is essential, but it remains to be seen whether air strikes will produce anything other than a short-term boost to western morale.

Air strikes on Raqqa may set IS back, but the war on ‘terror’ won’t be won by bombs alone. Amongst other things, political instability and violence helped bring us to this point, and only political settlement, or settlements in this case and in this region, may help make us safer.