Some mixed messages go out to Putin, Syria, ISIS

Let me take this opportunity to join with our Prime Minister and foreign secretary in commending President Donald Trump’s swift and decisive military action against the Syrian government as being “appropriate”.

The important thing was not the destruction of a few Syrian planes and children. The crucial point is that this moderate and judicious use of expensive missiles “sends out a message” to President Assad. And the message is very simple. We will no longer tolerate Syrian children being killed by unpleasant chemical weapons. We may think of Syrians as pitiful specimens who do not amount to much, but in fact they are actually human beings. And as human beings, they have the right to be killed by high–ordnance, weaponry like those Tomahawk cruise missiles that Mr Trump dispatched and which did kill a few lucky children living near the airbase. Mr Assad must learn that it is barbaric to kill kids with nerve gas, but civilised to kill them with explosives.

Another message it sends out is that we shall in future act as referees in this interesting conflict — in order to spin it out for as long as is humanly possible, and thus maximise the number of people killed. If too many people are killed by one side in a very short space of time we will intervene. We want many, many more people to be killed over a much longer period of time — and this will be the effect of that raid on Mr Assad’s nasty aeroplanes. Even if the Tomahawks did somehow miss the runway, it has still slowed a little the Syrian government’s attempts to achieve victory. The war will drag on for longer, perhaps much longer. And while it does so, we will sit on those unfeasibly high stools overlooking the net and decide who has made a foot fault. And when we notice it we shall penalise it immediately. We want this war to be played out in a pristine manner. May the best man win.

Which is the other message we are sending out. We are strictly impartial in this exciting contest. For sure, we have some sympathies with the secular, liberal Syrian opposition — but that is a total of seven people. The rest of the combatants — the ragtaggle alliance of jihadi maniacs, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and those Nusra savages versus the unpleasantly totalitarian Assad regime — well, we’re unable to make a call on that one. We’re straight down the middle. We don’t much like any of them. We have selflessly disregarded our own geopolitical interests.

Mr Assad was a possible ally in the war against Islamic terrorism but we put these minor and selfish considerations to one side. We urged on the participants of the Arab Spring as we fully expected the insurgents to install, in place of those dictators, liberal and democratic administrations like the kind of thing Tim Farron or Chris Patten might institute in our own country, were they ever allowed near the levers of power. OK, it hasn’t quite worked out like that. Hard to imagine why not, but there we are. But at least we tried, just as we did when we invaded Iraq with clean, depleted uranium bombs.

There are more messages those Tomahawks sent out. To the Russians, for example: we would rather have you as an enemy than a friend. A message reinforced by Boris Johnson’s principled decision to cancel his trip to Moscow and thus take us back in time, as far as relations between our two countries are concerned. We are somehow far more comfortable hating the Russians than we are in facing the maniacal wrath of an entire religion. More messages. Still more messages from those Tomahawks. That the UK government will generally hold a handkerchief to its nose when the name of Donald Trump is mentioned, but then embrace him warmly when he does something truly deranged and dangerous for domestic political reasons. So many messages from just $50 million worth of Tomahawk cruise missiles. Money well spent, I think.