Hapless Hague’s bombs would have aided IS

EVEN by the exceptionally low standards of some recent Foreign Secretaries, William Hague was a failure. His Radio 4 interview last week with political historian Lord ( Peter) Hennessy demonstrated yet again his disastrous command of foreign affairs.

First, the former Tory leader expressed pride in the Cameron government’s calamitous intervention in Libya six years ago. Mr Hague justified the decision to topple Colonel Gaddafi on the grounds that the Libyan leader’s forces were about to commit a massacre in the east of the country — an assertion which has since been comprehensively disproved.

Worse still, Mr Hague said he regretted that MPs voted against British military intervention in Syria after the chemical weapons atrocity near the capital, Damascus, in 2013 — which was claimed to have been the work of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. A hapless Mr Hague said that had Britain intervened, we would have shortened the country’s civil war. Sadly, the truth is the opposite. Had we bombed Syria, we would have given great assistance to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS), the two dominant forces fighting the Assad regime, and increased the scale of human suffering beyond measure.