What the commentators said

The “unimaginably awful” siege of Ghouta highlights yet again the horror of Syria’s civil war, said Ian Bond in The Observer. But it’s too easy just to condemn Assad and the Kremlin for the carnage. “The truth is that brutality is winning in Syria because the democratic powers are afraid to confront it.” If we really wanted to stop the fighting, a well-planned campaign to “degrade Assad’s military capabilities” might very well do the trick. It worked in Bosnia in 1995, when Nato air strikes helped to force Slobodan Miloševic to the negotiating table; it could work again now. Certainly, the US is partly to blame, said Tim Lister on Cnn.com. Barack Obama failed to act on his threat to intervene in Syria when the regime first used chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013. Now his successor is showing the same weakness. Last summer, Donald Trump pledged that Assad would pay “a heavy price” if he used chemical weapons again. But the “tough language” has since “evaporated”.

It’s all very well to threaten intervention, said Freddy Gray on his Spectator blog, but the lesson of recent history is that unleashing Western missiles too often makes matters worse. Look what happened when our “shaming” use of force was used to topple Libya’s President Gaddafi in 2011: Libya is now a country of “slave markets” and “a springboard for the refugee crisis”. No, we should act as many MPS did in 2013 when invited to back air strikes in Syria: “pause, reflect on the consequences of military action and dial down the cant about moral leadership”. Besides, who precisely would we be supporting in Syria, asked Robert Fisk in The Independent. The Western media chooses to ignore the uncomfortable truth that many of the diehard fighters defending Eastern Ghouta are members of the Islamist al-nusra group, linked to both Islamic State and al-qa’eda. It is rank hypocrisy to “bellow our outrage” at Assad if we are not also ready to condemn jihadists who are just as prone to committing “crimes against humanity”.