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In theory, the United States, even now, could bring significant force to bear. But its president is unwilling or even unable to grasp the concept. And Canadian politicians have proved unwilling, over three decades and both major parties, to acquire armed forces capable of independent action or even significant support for our allies in a deeply troubled world.

The only rational explanation is that they genuinely don’t grasp that force is the trump suit in geopolitics, or get Hilaire Belloc’s couplet, “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.”

Frederick the Great said diplomacy without force is like music without instruments. Yet politicians such as Dion and Kerry consider themselves Mozarts of multilateralism, whose enchanting melodies can bend foreign despots to our will and reform their souls so they stop wanting to kill people with weapons they deliberately acquired for that purpose while we deliberately didn’t because we were convinced weapons are obsolete and icky.

If I have to explain what’s wrong with that self image ,the effort is probably futile. But here goes.

Bashar Assad is a bad man. With me so far? He’s not misunderstood, he doesn’t have a different truth, and if he was warped by a miserable childhood we can give him therapy and hugs once he is deposed, but not before.

He lives in a bad neighbourhood where he inherited his father’s murderous tyranny and made it worse. Plenty of people in Syria would kill him in a heartbeat, from genuinely decent ones to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant maniacs against whom our government has the same weirdly nesh attitude regarding military action. Assad won’t stop killing his enemies, real or imagined, and any civilians who happen to be in the way, until he is killed or deposed. So if we want his aircraft to stop slaughtering civilians, we have to kill or depose him.