Does William Hague know what he is doing with Syria?

A week or so after the murder of a British soldier by two psychopathic savages in Woolwich, the Foreign Secretary William Hague is back pleading with our European partners to help the murderers’ brothers fighting the jihad in Syria. I use the term ‘brothers’ a little loosely, sure; it is the term they would use.

The photographs of one such jihadi chopping up and indeed eating a Syrian army soldier has not dissuaded Mr Hague from the view that these people are in the main peace-loving democrats who wish for nothing more than an agreeable secular state with the full panoply of human rights for all. He was not dissuaded of this by the jihadis eating people, or attacking Christians, or proclaiming their allegiance to Al Qaeda. Nor still by the turn taken by all of the other countries who participated in that “Glorious Arab Spring” (© BBC 2011).

I still cannot work out why we are so intent in shepherding in to Syria a regime which will be a) more oppositional to the West and b) nastier for most Syrians than the admittedly horrible ones under which they have languished for the past 43 years. Is it simply a naïve humanitarianism? A surfeit of deluded liberal evangelism? Just big-bollocked international grandstanding? Does William really think that, given help, the so-called “moderate elements” within the rebels will be triumphant? Who they, ed? And what possible evidence does he have for this bland assertion – certainly not the events which unfolded in Libya or Egypt. Should William not heed the advice given last week by a predecessor of his, Lord Carrington, who pointed out with some justification that every attempt on the part of the West to meddle in the affairs of the Middle East had made things substantially worse? And to what extent has the war against the Assad regime been artificially sustained, and therefore more deaths occasioned, by outside encouragement and aid?

The next Spectator Debate on 24 June will be debating the motion ‘Assad is a war criminal.