By focusing on Assad’s grim regime, MPs are ignoring a greater evil

Well, is it our fault? George Osborne has repeated his claim, which he has made already, that the situation in Aleppo did not ‘come out of a vacuum’ but was due to a ‘vacuum of Western and British leadership’. Specifically he was taking issue with the Commons’ vote three years ago not to back airstrikes on the Assad regime on account of its use of chemical weapons – you know, Barack Obama’s red line issue. There’s a lot of this kind of thing around. The Commons yesterday was in full blown tearful mode yesterday in the debate on Aleppo called by Andrew Mitchell in the course of which George emerged to take the moral high ground. Personally, I think that 2013 vote not to intervene against Assad was one of the few instances of MPs behaving rationally in this entire unhappy situation, but it says much about the defective character of debate that almost everyone who took part took it as read that MPs, notably Labour, had let humanity down on that occasion.