Our Friends In Tripoli?

We needed Syria on side in the first Gulf War, so we blamed Libya instead for Lockerbie, a Syrian atrocity. Libya later needed us (or, at least, the Americans) on side, so Gaddafi played ball and handed over an innocent man, just as he later did and pretended to have dismantled a WMD programme which had never existed in the first place.

Alliance with Libya, run by the Gaddafis and where at least a third of the population subscribes to the Sanusi synthesis of Wahhabism and popular Sufism, is either irrelevant or positively pernicious, depending on how you look at it.

Whereas alliance with Syria – run by an erstwhile London doctor and with a huge, very well-integrated Christian population – is an urgent priority.

However, there can be no alliance with Syria while this great wrong remains unrighted.

Though not for that reason alone, that righting cannot possibly come too soon.