So Parliament has chucked out David Cameron's attempt to get agreement in principle for military action in Syria. The Guardian thinks this a good thing, judging by its leader this morning. "The most important objective in the current phase of the Syrian war", it writes, "is to stamp out any use of chemical weapons".
As I argued yesterday, killing 500 people with chemical weapons is not much more loathsome than killing 50,000 with conventional ones, and possibly quite a bit less so. But moving on, "That is best achieved by making a renewed case to the nations of the world that chemical weapons must always be beyond the pale, by establishing that a breach of that global proscription of such weapons has occurred, and ensuring that the international ban on them must be upheld and enforced. The world's message is more effective when most widely supported".
Gosh. The person who wrote that must have been welling up. I almost got a lump in the throat reading it.
But the key word here is "enforced". Enforced by whom? As the Graun knows very well, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of the ban on chemical weapons being enforced. Even getting an UN resolution condemning the Assad government's conduct is impossible, because any motion will be vetoed by Russia. The idea that the international community is going to enforce a ban is laughable.
But for the Graun, trotting out ringing declarations of principle is infinitely preferable to facing the reality that, at least according to their own view, something outstandingly dreadful has happened and they aren't willing to support the only action that might plausibly reduce the chances of it happening again.
The only people who might have the reach and resolve to do something are the much-reviled Americans. No-one else will. The "world's message" the Graun speaks of is, "we think it's dreadful, but not so dreadful we're actually going to do anything about it".
Foreign policy as self-delusion.
Did Parliament do the right thing? These are agonisingly difficult choices, but on balance I would say no. Undoubtedly the legacy of Iraq, which British politicians remember chiefly for Blair's manipulations and the accompanying failures of military intelligence rather than the free press and free elections which followed Saddam's downfall, has made it very difficult to get MPs to authorise foreign adventures. It's a shame they don't think back a little further, to Kosovo, where Blair persuaded Bill Clinton to authorise limited air strikes which eventually brought the Milosevic government down.
At present, I'm guessing that President Assad is quietly pleased with David Cameron's defeat.
PS Here is Paddy Pantsdown, aka Lord Ashdown, trending on Twitter this morning - "We are a hugely diminished country this a.m. MPs cheered last night. Assad, Putin this morning".
