How to use air power in Iraq for a good cause – bring a tent city from Afghanistan --- The tents left over from our invasion of Afghanistan could easily be brought in to save Iraqi refugees’ lives – but it requires David Cameron to act now -- n the country around Irbil there are about 120,000 refugees who have fled Islamic State (Isis). Winter is coming and large numbers may die. The British army is clearly not going to be deployed to save them, but in an extraordinarily ironic twist there is a tent city left over from our invasion of Afghanistan that might save lives in Iraq, if only we could get it there. -- Thirty sea containers outside Kandahar hold the tents, the generators and the plumbing for a winter-proof army camp, suitable for 1,000 people. The British army has given it all away to a company named Agility because it does not want to fly the equipment to England; it includes armoured vehicles among other items. -- Agility has a contract that binds it to sell the equipment to the highest bidder. About $450,000 (£281,000) will secure the tents – if paid before the end of the week. At least one Christian aid organisation is prepared to pay this. But the tents are in Kandahar and the refugees who need them are in the mountains of northern Iraq. To ship them overland would take three months. The only way to get them to Irbil before the winter would be to fly them in but air freight to Kurdistan is prohibitively expensive: what could have been done for half a million dollars three weeks ago would now cost well over a million. -- That is prohibitive for a charity. But it is absurd that the material left over from one of the great follies of British foreign policy cannot be used to make the consequences of the criminal folly of our invasion of Iraq slightly less awful. -- It would be a simple matter for the government to order the RAF to fly the tents from Afghanistan to Iraq. It would involve no military force, no threat to British lives and no weakening of our credibility. On the contrary it would show that sometimes there is substance to our rhetoric about helping the victims of the terrible war in Iraq. -- For this to happen David Cameron needs to decide it should: left to its own devices the bureaucracy of the Department for International Development could grind for months. By that time refugees would be dead and we would have done nothing to help them. -- It is absurd to suppose that we can now do very much to improve the situation in Iraq and Syria. We’re not going to fight and none of our favoured proxies seem able to do so either. Bombing is largely symbolic and even if it has helped to slow some of the advance of Isis, it clearly won’t drive them back or destroy them. Here is a chance to use air power in Iraq for an entirely good cause. -- It is only a drop in the ocean of need to rescue 1,000 refugees of all the tens of thousands who need and deserve our help – and the hundreds of thousands across the wider war zone that encompasses Syria and much of Iraq. But the magnitude of the catastrophe should not paralyse us. It only makes it more urgent that we should do what we can. If we can’t put boots on the ground to protect refugees from Isis is it too much to ask that we put tents on the ground to shelter them from the winter? -- More, Andrew Brown, Guardian