Following my trip to Syria this week, I am even more convinced that parliament’s decision in September 2013 not to strike and oust Bashar al-Assad after the Obama Redline disappeared and the Syrian regime’s killing of 1500 people in a massive chemical attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta was a dreadful strategic and humanitarian error.
The Syria of 2013 was not like Iraq in 2003 (I was there) as Ed Miliband and many of the then Labour Party believed. But Syria today is like Iraq’s 2003, except there is no British or Western blood associated with it. It is all blood from Russia and the Syrian regime.
In the past 11 years, the Russians and Assad possibly killed half a million civilians and destroyed the country physically and financially. Only 25 per cent of Homs, the third city with a population of over one million, still stands. Just 10-20 per cent of buildings in the rebel suburbs of Damascus still remain.
Following my trip to Syria this week, I am even more convinced that parliament’s decision in September 2013 not to strike and oust Bashar al-Assad after the Obama Redline disappeared and the Syrian regime’s killing of 1500 people in a massive chemical attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta was a dreadful strategic and humanitarian error.
The Syria of 2013 was not like Iraq in 2003 (I was there) as Ed Miliband and many of the then Labour Party believed. But Syria today is like Iraq’s 2003, except there is no British or Western blood associated with it. It is all blood from Russia and the Syrian regime.
In the past 11 years, the Russians and Assad possibly killed half a million civilians and destroyed the country physically and financially. Only 25 per cent of Homs, the third city with a population of over one million, still stands. Just 10-20 per cent of buildings in the rebel suburbs of Damascus still remain.