Even this far out, it seems likely that Australia will have a khaki election in 2016 - a state of affairs generally regarded as advantageous to the governing party.

This fact alone is enough to fuel suspicions that Tony Abbott's motives for deploying our armed forces are impure.

But what choice does he really have given the participation of Australian citizens in the war and the risk  returning jihadist fanatics present domestically?

Certainly the main champions of committing troops - Washington and Canberra - expect their respective commitments to last for "many many months" as Abbott has warned, and more likely will extend into years.

That means beyond the current elected terms of governments on both sides of the Pacific.

Labor wants to minimise that advantage, with Bill Shorten staying in lock-step and declaring "Labor and Liberal" to be on the same team when it comes to national security and fighting terrorism.

Like Abbott, Shorten is contending with a conflation of Labor's sectional political interest and his best assessment of what is in the national interest.

And it turns out that the two considerations align, just as they do for the government.

Yet voters may not see it that way - particularly in the case of the deeply unpopular Abbott.

So convinced are his detractors, that many would expect him to hawkishly pull the nationalist lever for his own gain irrespective of the strategic implications.

Funny then that Barack Obama, the president who wanted to be known for pulling his country out of costly Middle East wars, has reluctantly arrived at the same point.

Obama is no hawk and had been strongly criticised for dithering - for taking an excessively deliberative approach to the ISIL threat prompting Republicans and their shameless media barrackers to brand him weak.

His four-point plan last week, laying out the case for defeating the ISIL movement, was far from that. Rather, it was a polished example of measured state-craft conveying his administration's care to avoid overreach and his utter determination to meet the rampant international terrorism burgeoning from Iraq and Syria.

Genuine questions however hang over the whole enterprise including whether it is even possible to defeat ISIL militarily without ground troops and what role Australia should play specifically.

It is also a mistake to assume that a protracted Australian engagement in Iraq would continue to hold popular support.

Abbott is alive to this risk and on Monday was being careful to hose down public expectations amid concerns about the ill-defined nature of the proposed commitment.

It was, he said, designed to do nothing more than to achieve a security situation which could be managed by the Iraqis themselves.

This was some distance short of the words of his own Foreign Minister Julie Bishop who just last week spoke of a "strategy to defeat, (and) destroy ISIL".

Either way, the political implications of a protracted military engagement are, like the deployment itself, yet to become clear.

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