I do not believe anything good can come of President Obama's pursuit of ISIS in Iraq or Syria. It is an ill considered course of action, hastily undertaken out of fear, to shore up crumbling states that are the legacy of European imperialism. To "degrade and destroy" a ruling political entity is not sufficient; something must be established in its place. The American people are neither prepared nor motivated to establish a new imperial order in the Middle East, as the course of the 2003 Iraq invasion showed. We should therefore leave the peoples of the region to sort out their own affairs, and act only to protect our own interests.
We assume incorrectly that "Iraq" and "Syria" are nation-states in the Western sense, political entities evolved from the shared national consciousness of their peoples with long histories stretching back hundreds of years. This is not so; one hundred years ago there were no such states as Iraq or Syria; they were created by Western fiat after World War I with arbitrarily drawn boundaries respecting neither religion, nor language, nor shared historical experience.
While al-`Iraq is a name that has been used to describe Mesopotamia (al-Iraq al-`Arabi) and the adjacent region of Iran (al-`Iraq al-`Ajami) for more than a thousand years, it's never been a united entity. Parts have always belonged to this or that empire; even if Baghdad was for a time the nominal or actual capital of a Caliphate, it was never an Iraqi Caliphate. There was never a King of Iraq before Faisal I, whom the British installed in 1921. Neither was there any Iraqi flag, anthem, or national movement; there is not, and never has been, an Iraqi nation, but only an arbitrary state established by an imperial power for its own convenience.
The name Baghdad, by the way, is not Arabic; it is an Iranian name that is essentially the same as the Russian personal name Bogdan; both mean "God-given" (Bagh/bog = "God"; dad/dan = "given"). For most of a thousand years, from the time of Cyrus the Great until 633, Iraq belonged to successive Iranian empires: Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid, interrupted only for a few decades by Alexander the Great and his Seleucid successors..
As for as-Suriya, the name of the republic we call Syria, that's not the traditional name of any region. The region traditionally described as Syria on Western maps was called ash-Sham in Arabic, and it included Jordan, Israel, and Palestine -- none of which are names the locals would have used before World War I. Ash-Sham usually belonged to Egypt, or whatever power held Egypt; the last empire that called it home was the Caliphate of the Umayyads, which ruled from 661 to 750. Here the power of the Mongols was stopped, by an Egyptian Mamluk army, at `Ain Jalut (which name means "spring" -- literally, "eye" -- "of Goliath") in 1260.
The history of the Middle East is that of the waxing and waning of such empires: Assyrian, Egyptian, Hittite, Persian, Roman, Arab, Mongol, Ottoman, British. It is the nature of empires, and indeed of all human institutions, to decline and fall. If George W. Bush inadvertently gave the fatal shove to the tottering house of cards established by the British and French in the Middle East a century ago, it can only because that order is no longer seen as legitimate by those who live with it. Humpty Dumpty has fallen, and all Barack Obama's horses and all Barack Obama's men can never put it back together; they can only prolong the agony out of which the next regional order will arise.
"Fixing" Iraq and Syria should be left to the locals, even if some of the things they build there may not look pretty to us. We have more pressing problems of our own to tackle.