The Syria debate has become dangerously partisan

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at best, stupid at least.

This is a civil war in which the options are, in the modern euphemism, sub-optimal, a choice of two evils, of whom the Assad forces backed by the Russians seem quite plainly to be the least worst.