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.

At the start of next month a new law enters the American statute book. It is actually an extension of an existing law nicknamed the “Good Samaritan Law” which was passed to allow people to lawfully break into a car if they saw a child trapped inside.

The law is now to be extended to cover animals so that if, for example, you were to see a dog locked in a car, gasping for breath on a hot sunny day you could break into the car and rescue the animal without fear of criminal prosecution or any civil liability to the car owner.

The move has been welcomed by animal welfare groups concerned by numerous incidents of dogs left in locked cars in the heat of summer to literally roast to death or die of asphyxiation. Opponents of the law say that it smacks of big brother but if it means that people remember to leave their car windows open when locking pets inside then surely, it is a good thing.

Anyway, irrespective of legislation, I would hope that any decent human being could not ignore and walk past a locked car containing distressed infants or animals on a hot day. The first action would be to quickly try to find the owner of the car but if that proved fruitless the second would be to force entry or break the window and then face the legal consequences. Life, human or animal, is too important for any other response.