Recently British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond said the struggle against Islamic State was "effectively Iraq's last chance as nation state."

That somber assessment followed his visit to Iraq a few days earlier, where he had used the expression "last chance saloon" to describe Iraq's dire predicament.

Iraq, like Syria, was a consequence of World War I and of the infamous, in Arab eyes, agreement between Sir Mark Sykes and Francois-Georges Picot that led to the division of the former Ottoman Turkish domains by the two leading European powers, Britain and France. That agreement, now almost a century old, appears in tatters, as both countries are broken, exhausted by years of war and sectarian division for which there is no easy repair.