There’s an old saying that you should be careful what you wish for and this has been illustrated perfectly over the last few days with details emerging of the latest Islamic State (IS) atrocities against the West.

When Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi  were the brutal dictators of Iraq and Libya respectively the West united to remove them from power by bombing Gaddafi into submission and in the case of Saddam, invading his country. The West also gave tacit encouragement (and in some cases aid) to facilitate regime change in Tunisia and Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

The problem was that our leaders never gave thought, or at least enough thought, as to what would happen once those changes had occurred and who would rule those countries in place of the removed tyrants.

As we know, the void was filled in virtually every case by Muslim extremists and worse still, those extremists have formed a new Caliphate (Islamic State) which is hell-bent on destroying everything and everybody that doesn’t fit in with its warped view of humanity. That Caliphate couldn’t possibly have been created had the West left Iraq and Saddam Hussein alone.

So, as we mourn the deaths of at least 30 British tourists slaughtered on a Tunisian Beach last Friday and the death of a French businessman beheaded by his Muslim employee, his head then tied to the factory fence, we must wonder what and who is next. There will be further atrocities, of that there can be no doubt.

Eventually, the West will have to take direct action and put men on the ground to confront the evil of IS. Those further atrocities will mean it has no choice. In the meantime our leaders can ponder on another old saying, when reviewing the removal of Saddam, Gaddafi and others, better the devil you know than the one you don’t.