If David Cameron wants a military capable of toppling Assad, he’ll have to pay for it

Libya is a success from which David Cameron might not recover. This, at any rate, seems to be the fear of Sir David Richards who has marked his exit as head of the military with a Daily Telegraph interview. He appears to reinforcing a point David Cameron once made: ‘I am not,’ he once said, ‘a naive neo-con who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet.’  The Prime Minister was proved right in Libya: the Tomahawk missiles he fired at Libya cruised at just 400 feet before sinking into their targets which (in Gaddafi’s case) was enough to restrain the tyrant and introduce democracy. Bur Sir David is saying this is not an option in Syria: if you want to topple Assad you’d have to send in the Army.

‘If you wanted to have the material impact on the Syrian regime’s calculations that some people seek, a no fly zone per se is insufficient.