Can you tell a good guy from a bad guy in the Middle East?

Please excuse the tone of jubilation, but I have been dancing around my kitchen for the past couple of days, in a state well beyond elation, at the removal from power of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria and its successors who, I am convinced, are a little like our own Liberal Democrats, except with powerful rifles.

An expert from a Washington D.C. thinktank told the BBC that some of the chaps who had marched through from Homs to Damascus were ‘moderates’. This was the line taken up, so far as I am aware, by the corporation itself and indeed most other broadcasters – hence my delight. It may be the case that some of them had previously been combatants for the Islamic State or al Qaeda – but we were told they had put that little bit of naughtiness behind them. We are all foolish and headstrong in our younger years, are we not? Even when it is discovered that the name under which these freedom-lovin’ democrats have been fighting – HTS – actually stands for ‘Chop off the infidel’s head and stick it on a pole’ or something, we should not rush to judgment too quickly. Anything is better than Assad, isn’t it?

I don’t know why western liberals are like this, unless it is just a simple case of abiding stupidity. I mean, I understand where the impulse comes from: all regimes are inherently wicked and therefore any instance of ‘freedom fighters’ overthrowing a regime is to be welcomed because it must be for the better, because freedom fighters are good people who have been terribly transgressed and persecuted. That this is a grotesquely naive and mistaken assumption is proven every single time a regime is overthrown, without fail – and yet still they cleave to it.