The Booker-North thesis, as it stands, is that with the Sunni tribes rallying against ISIS, the worst of the crisis in Iraq is over and is "moving into its final phase".

This perspective contradicts what Mr Cameron is saying, so it is not allowed. "Of course there is conflict between Shias and Sunnis", the prime minister tells us, "but that is the wrong way to see what is really happening. What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other". Then says Cameron:

These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Thus, we are told, "this threat cannot simply be removed by airstrikes alone. We need a tough, intelligent and patient long-term approach that can defeat the terrorist threat at source".

Unusually for authored pieces by politicians – and especially by Mr Cameron – there is a comments facility, giving hundreds of readers the opportunity to tell the prime minister he is wrong. There is no such thing as an extremist perversion of Islam, they say. There is only Islam.

Whether or not this is the case, though, Islam cannot be divorced from its context of tribalism. The reason why the religion has taken such deep root in the Middle East and all the way to the Indian sub-continent is that it fits with the underlying tribal mores, rather than replacing them. The tribe comes first, and demands the greater loyalty.

The important thing about this is that, in the region where we see ISIS operating, we are seeing a classic tribal surge, of the sort we also see in Afghaistan and have seen so many times before. Take away the tribal context, take away the support of the tribes, and there is no Islamic uprising. There is no insurrection. There is "simply" (if anything is simply in the Middle East) a borderless tribal surge colliding with the constraints of nationalism. 

For this reason, I find myself disagreeing totally with Cameron. "We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology, which I believe we will be fighting for the rest of my political lifetime", he says.

But, in fact, we are dealing with a dynamic that reaches back before Islam, to pre-Christian times. Colonial Britain faced rebellions in Iraq, the Raj faced such surges in Afghanistan, Churchill was familiar with them and the Faqir of Ipi kept the inheritors of the Raj busy into the 1950s.

What Mr Cameron wants us to believe is that ISIS/ISIL is "a new threat that is single-minded, determined and unflinching in pursuit of its objectives". Gilding the lily, he goes on to assert that it "controls not just thousands of minds, but thousands of square miles of territory, sweeping aside much of the boundary between Iraq and Syria to carve out its so-called caliphate", making "no secret of its expansionist aims".

The reality is, though, that it is old wine in new bottles - these surges come and go. The insurgents do not "control" the territory they currently occupy, and the extent of which they do occupy is diminishing by the day. In a matter of months, the fighting in Iraq will be all but over – and that's what the Telegraph didn't want Booker to say. They don't want him contradicting Mr Cameron and his vision of an all-threatening, all enduring caliphate.

Syria is, of course, a different matter, but the same dynamic is at play. A fractured insurgency survives there because of weakness at the centre. In this case, though, it is greatly facilitated by Mr Cameron and his allies. Had he succeeded in taking military action to bring down Assad, the likelihood is that ISIS would be even more strongly entrenched than it is now.

For sure, as Mr Cameron says, ISIS has the ancient city of Aleppo firmly within its sights. And it boasts of its designs on Jordan and Lebanon, and right up to the Turkish border. If it succeeds, says Cameron, we would be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member.

And that is the paradigm with which the prime minister is working. Right at the beginning of his piece, he declares that, "The creation of an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and extending into Syria is not a problem miles away from home. Nor is it a problem that should be defined by a war 10 years ago. It is our concern here and now".

But this is no "caliphate". Even now, the Grand Mufti has rejected the title "Islamic State"and has been contemptuous of its putative leader, al-Baghdadi. There is no "terrorist state" and the surge won't succeed. These tribal surges never do. Eventually they outstrip their tribal bases, and begin to fragment. That is exactly what is happening in Iraq, where that the force of the insurgency is already spent.

Syria, on the other hand, will need different treatment. The uprising there is coinciding with and feeding off the destruction of a nation state, a situation which Mr Cameron did much to promote and has gone out of his way to assist. But it is wrong to conjoin Syria and Iraq - they are essentially separate issues, albeit with trans-border implications.

When it comes down to it, therefore, Cameron doesn't even begin to understand the nature of the problems he is dealing with (or not dealing with). Furthermore, he doesn't have any real solutions – only platitudes. This can be seen from the conclusion to his piece:

This is a clear danger to Europe and to our security. It is a daunting challenge. But it is not an invincible one, as long as we are now ready and able to summon up the political will to defend our own values and way of life with the same determination, courage and tenacity as we have faced danger before in our history. That is how much is at stake here: we have no choice but to rise to the challenge.

Before we can go anywhere, he needs to be more specific about the nature of this challenge and, as far as I can see, he's got it so wrong that we won't have any useful contribution to make. He is taking us up a blind alley on the basis of a false diagnosis.

Returning to the Booker column and the Telegraph though, it is a sad day when a national newspaper will not tolerate any alternative view, allowing itself to be used as a platform for a politician and suppressing any dissenting voices in its own pages.