Well, it looks like the Syria crisis is over, at least as far as the West is concerned. President Assad has now agreed to hand over the chemical weapons which he doesn’t have and has never used, so that’s all right then!

It seems to me that nobody has covered themselves in glory in this squalid matter. President Obama, decent man that he undoubtedly is, has shown himself to be even more indecisive and dithering than many of us thought he was in the first place. No doubt he has spent the last month regretting ever talking about the crossing of red lines. His deputy, John Kerry, for all his humanitarian concern has proved to be all hot air and his talk of carrying out an “unbelievably small” strike on Syria was laughable. Americans have a splendid phrase about walking the walk and Obama and Kerry should observe it very carefully.

President Putin of Russia, that wily and crafty fox, has turned out to be an unlikely peacemaker since it was the Russians who brokered the deal which ended the crisis and got Obama off the hook. His country will no doubt continue to sell arms to Assad.

We British have our Parliament to thank for making our unrealistically ambitious Prime Minister think again and avoid committing British troops to yet another ill conceived foreign adventure. The opportunistic French have had their brief moment in the limelight as America’s best buddies and may well continue to make grave pronouncements backed up by nothing but rhetoric. Always been good talkers, the French.

The United Nations has shown once again that, in its present form, it is worse than useless and cannot be relied upon to do what it is supposed to do namely to keep the peace and prevent tyrants from butchering their own people. It needs an urgent overhaul and we in the West should be pressurising our politicians to campaign for that overhaul. It is not right or fair to expect the Americans to sort out the world’s multitude of problems.

In the meantime, the real victims of this tragedy, the ordinary Syrian people, who want nothing more than to live in peace and security with their loved ones will continue to pay, with their lives,  the price of Assad’s cruelty and the UN’s incompetence.