Pious finger-pointing ‘is sickening’

It is also a shameless disregard for the many more casualties of conventional weaponry. What difference is there between being gassed and being shot or bombarded to obliteration?

Ironically, the incompetent US president Barack Obama, shaken that his macho “chemical weapons equals a red line” rhetoric has come back to haunt him, contrives to downplay the situation as merely “a big event of grave concern”. Meanwhile, our posturing Foreign Secretary, William Hague, feigns certainty that Bashar al- Assad’s military is behind the atrocity. He knows that others, including the opposition itself, are capable of inflicting misery on their own as a diversionary gambit.

In truth, what we are witnessing in Syria is only the latest in a lengthy catalogue of slaughter permeating our history. Work forward from the Old Testament to the present, and you will find numerous such massacres – as often perpetrated on kinsfolk as on perceived enemies.

The supposedly superior human race is, in fact, capable of a cold-blooded savagery not found among allegedly less intelligent “wild” animals. Humans are most primitive at political level, and the idea of leaders of countries – including the UK – piously pointing their own bloodstained fingers at others is sickening. We must above all not take sides in this dispute. The proper humanitarian response would be to channel all available funds into countries hosting the tragic refugees from the madness. Adding to the killing will not help them.

ROBERT DOW

Ormiston Road

Tranent, East Lothian

After the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scandal, I would have thought it sensible to exercise a degree of caution over the accusations of atrocities emanating from Syria these days.

I am also at a loss to understand why our governments seem so keen in recent Middle Eastern conflicts to support the faction that is most opposed to the West.

We invaded, bombed and undermined Hussein (Iraq), Gadaffi (Libya) and Mubarak (Egypt), who may not have been democrats, but they stood between us and our implacable foes: the Islamists.

Even the murder in London of a British soldier by two alleged jihadists did not deflect Foreign Secretary William Hague from demanding that we help their brothers fighting in Syria. In fact, his belief that these are peace-loving democrats fighting for a multi-faith state with full human rights survived even the sight of a rebel dicing and eating a Syrian soldier. With our army cut to 80,000 men with dodgy kit and poor transport, we will be reduced to shooting up the suburbs of yet another Arab capital and I suggest we sit this one out.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews, Fife

WITH regards to weekend reports that our Prime Minister and the US president had talks on how to bombard Damascus with air-borne missiles, from where did David Cameron find the planes after he scrapped our carriers and built another that has no capacity for existing aircraft?

Terry Duncan

Greame Road

Bridlington, East Yorkshire