Thursday 11th February

We have all seen the pictures on the TV; bombed buildings, young men waving Kalshnikovs from the back of Toyota trucks and children waiting in the refugee camps, but the reality escapes us all.  We are bored observers, flipping from channel to channel to escape the horror; and after all who can blame us, this has been going on for four years already – incidentally the length of the First World War itself and still no real resolution in sight.  And nobody really knows what is going on.  The Americans have dirty hands, having secretly armed and trained opposition groups to try to topple Assad.  The Saudi’s are supposed to be funding many militant Shia groups too.  Iran; well wherever Saudi is involved Iran is bound to be on the other side.  Turkey has been sticking it’s muddy little oar in too; rumours that the President’s son is actually buying the oil from ISIS abound.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel is rubbing it’s hands as it watches a traditional enemy in ruins.  Britain, France and a few others are all doing our bit to reduce a once prosperous country to rubble.  And Russia – ah, now things get interesting, Russia in a particularly expansionist phase is backing Assad’s tired forces with lots of heavy air-power, and they may have just turned the tide.

A couple of years ago Cameron was trying to persuade us to attack Assad, and now it is ISIS we are bombing.  But you have to wonder if anyone has any idea how this will all end.  Even if Assad eventually wins, and it could take a couple of years more, what sort of a country will he inherit, and will it have been worth it?  The rebels will almost certainly lose, but may in the end gain a modicum of so-called Democracy, though if they want to know what good it will do them they should ask their Iraqi neighbours.  ISIS will probably go underground and continue to attack the West in ever more horrible ways.  And a whole generation of young Arabs will be lost to all rational thought and decent behaviour.  Displaced Syrians are already massing at the borders with Turkey and Jordan, and Europe is terrified at the idea of millions more flooding in.  The refugee crisis will be with us for years to come.

If we are to learn anything from this very Twenty-First Century Tragedy it should be not to interfere in the first place, to choose our friends more carefully, that there will always be a heavy price to pay  and that War in this Modern World can never be contained, it spreads faster than Ebola and is twice as deadly.