Those who hoped for a Syrian spring and got one had no idea what they were wishing for. All they could see, as with Iraq, was a Bad Guy who needed to be toppled. They might have paused to consider that governance in some of those countries created in haste, in the aftermath of WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, is close to impossible. That is true of Syria in particular, where coups were staged almost on a weekly basis until the present Assad's dad got a grip.

And hard as it is for us to grasp, democracy might not be the answer. Jordan was gifted to the Saudi Hashemites after WW2 and that dynasty has ruled ever since. By western standards that's crazy, yet Jordan remains an oasis of stability in the world's most turbulent region. Face it, what works and what doesn't is a matter of chance. Ideology doesn't come into it.

I guess nothing will stop the west lecturing about chemical weapons, human rights, etc, but surely it has no right to interfere. Chemical weapons may be out of fashion now, but the US was happy to target Vietnamese civilians with napalm. The UK bemoaned ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, but virtually caused it - and on a many times greater scale - in the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent. And what gives the US, UK, France and Israel the right to deny Iran nuclear weapons? Sometimes hypocrisy in the west just beggars belief.

Tonight a US senator (Democrat) on BBC TV defended the renditioning of illegal combatants to be tortured, provided only that laws can be recodified to make the processes transparent. Tomorrow the same guy will probably be complaining about human rights in Syria.