Syria just proves the West is damned whatever it does

It is salutary to remember that were it not for Ed Miliband, Bashar al-Assad might have been deposed 11 years ago. In August 2013, the former Syrian leader gave the West the perfect pretext for acting to get rid of him: it was the first occasion he was proven to have used chemical weapons against his own people.

The then-prime minister, David Cameron, proposed military action but Miliband, then Labour leader, instructed his MPs to vote against. The vote was lost and, without Britain’s backing, Barack Obama – who had previously said that the use of chemical weapons would be a ‘red line’ – marched his troops back down the hill. Assad was free to go on murdering his people, including with further chemical weapons attacks.

The argument that deposing a malignant dictator would create a power vacuum, sucking in even fouler forces, has been shown to be fallacious.