Letter to John Baron MP
"Behind the scenes at Newsnight, John Baron MP said to me, “If you put your emotions aside, for the sake of containment, wouldn’t it be better if Assad won?”Ramifications for Britain and Europe include all those pertaining to a zone of economic collapse and trauma on the eastern Mediterranean, all the unforeseeable knock-on effects, including at very least a new illegal migration issue and a pool of new recruits for violent political/religious organisations.

This is very unlike Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody is asking for invasion or occupation, not for a single dead British soldier. Neither of those two occupations came at a time of mass popular revolution. Moderate Syrians are asking for the means to bring this to a conclusion themselves, to stop a genocide, a mass torture campaign, a mass rape campaign. Nobody is pretending at this late stage that the next day will be easy."