As the Syrian rebellion continues to worsen and reports of atrocities dominate our news bulletins, the temptation for the West to intervene grows stronger by the day. They must not.  No matter how disturbing the news from Syria, and it doesn’t get much worse than the footage of a rebel cutting out and apparently eating the heart and liver of a Syrian army soldier, the West must look at all and any alternatives to military intervention.

In truth, the West should do nothing, since the struggle is quite clearly a matter for the United Nations. It was for crises such as this that the UN was set up but its continued prevarication and impotence are there for all to see. All eyes therefore turn towards the world’s leading power, the USA, since, as the strongest country on the planet, it naturally falls upon them to be the world’s policeman as it did the British in the 19^thcentury.

On this occasion President Obama’s caution is a good thing since a hasty American intervention in yet another struggle between an Arab government and hard line Islamic fundamentalists would have extremely dangerous repercussions for the West. The West has enough on its plate in the war against terror without throwing more fuel on the fire.

The Syrian President Assad may well be a wicked dictator but maybe it’s a case of better the devil you know. If the rebels were to succeed and the West made attempts to introduce democracy the chances are that those attempts would fail, as they nearly always do in Middle East and other places where democratic government is a totally alien concept. The chances are that the void would then be filled by organised and fanatical Muslim zealots. The West cannot afford another hostile Middle Eastern Islamic state so the sensible approach has to be to leave well alone. Iraq and Afghanistan have surely demonstrated the wisdom in that.