Properly Treated

He falls uncharacteristically short of naming the most obvious example of The Woman Who Had It All With Hired Help, although he does name her in criticising the end of serious competition to the BBC (even if his solution is wrong). But Peter Hitchens writes:

Almost everything they have told you about the Middle East now turns out to have been wrong.

The Iranian people long for Western friendship. Properly treated, Iran could be our best ally in the region.

It’s worth noting, as well, how hard the supposedly wicked and evil Kremlin worked to help us get the nuclear agreement with Tehran.

But we have clung weirdly to our friendship with Saudi Arabia, which hates Iran and which is the source of most of the trouble in the region, as well as financing the spread of ultra-militant Islam, from Afghanistan to Bradford.

The Iranian deal at least gives us a chance to reconsider our position, but what a mess we are in. Iraq will not recover from our attempt to democratise it for at least a century, if ever.

The world is full of weapons and explosives (and homicidal mad men high on drugs) from Libya, thanks to Mr Cameron’s ill-considered overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

We have at last changed sides in Syria, having supported the Saudi-backed Islamist rebels until they had turned the country into a blood-drenched ruin – and then decided to back the Assad regime after all.

But what can we do? Last week one of our ancient bombers was flying back from the area having failed to find a target for its Brimstone missiles.

As it landed in Cyprus, the missiles fell off. Luckily they did not explode. We don’t know what we’re doing and, after five years of Tory-led government, our Armed Forces are decrepit and tiny.

Instead of trying to bring freedom to the Arab world, couldn’t we just concentrate on trying to fend off the European Union and defending our own porous borders?