The recent fall of Bashar Assad’s "murderous regime” in Syria was celebrated with Churchillian bombast by Foreign Secretary David Lammy in the House of Commons: "The Lion of Damascus” was now "the rat of Damascus, fleeing to Moscow with its tail between its legs.”
"Assad is a dictator,' thundered Lammy, "He is a criminal. He used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. He has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands.” The ghosts of British imperialists past looked down on the foreign secretary approvingly — yet the U.K. had played no part in the downfall of the dictator.
In 2013, it might have been a different story. At that time, Lammy voted against bombing Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, in line with Labour policy dictated by its former leader, Ed Miliband, now his colleague as energy secretary. When Tory party rebels joined the opposition, David Cameron’s government was left powerless to intervene.
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