For Syria there is no safe, morally pure solution | Jenni Russell

Ten years ago the leaders of Britain and America took us in to wars in Afghanistan and iraq fuelled by a messianic certainty about their ability to transform the world as they wished. Both Bush and Blair presided over countries with their own intractable problems – pockets of joblessness, drugs, gangs, inequality – but they combined an inability to solve these domestic issues with an insouciant confidence that, somehow, the problems of Far Away were simpler, and could definitely be sorted out swiftly by several thousand chaps with missiles and guns.

We have all learned how miserably, catastrophically wrong they were. What marks the proposed action against Syria is the weary, wary attitude of the people who feel they are now obliged to enter it. There are no illusions here, no fantasies about the smooth creation of harmonious democracies – only a grim sense that every other option has been exhausted, and that leaving tyrants free to break international rules with impunity will be more dangerous than anything that's gone before.