Just what sort of victory does Simon Jenkins believe that President Assad is going to get (Only Assad’s victory will end Syria’s civil war. The west can do nothing, theguardian.com, 9 April)? Syria is smashed, its cities in rubble, half its population displaced, and to bring this about Assad has had to mortgage his country’s independence to Russia and Iran. Turkey is helping itself to a new security belt in the north. Assad has failed his country and people, and should be held accountable for this and his myriad crimes.

Merely pointing the finger at western failures in Syria misses the full picture. No country and no actor comes out of this hell with any credit at all. Moreover, the most damaging external interventions in Syria in terms of destruction and killing were non-western, those of Russia, Iran, Turkey and Islamic State. The Gulf states ran a largely inept proxy war as well.

The question now is, after so much destruction and suffering, how can we give some meaning to the hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians killed in these wars? Reconstruction and reconciliation are vital, but so too is political change and more inclusive government.

Chris Doyle

Director, Caabu (Council for Arab-British Understanding)

• Maintaining hope and faith in humanity is hard enough these days. And now Patrick Wintour’s article about the ineffectiveness of the UN has sent a chill down my spine (Regime will regard American attack as a price worth paying for victory, 9 April).

The Russian vetoes (against sending Syria’s crimes to the international court), marginalisation of the special envoy, obstructing efforts to outlaw chemical weapons, the institutionalisation of impunity – the last few nails have been hammered into the UN’s coffin. These are dark times.

In its founding charter the UN declares that it will strive to achieve international cooperation in solving global problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

Countries that regularly commit human rights abuses (eg no women’s rights, persecution of religious minorities, lack of freedoms of the press) are violating this charter. Why are they allowed to remain as members?

The UN is not fit for purpose. It should get rid of the veto, a device used by bully states to the detriment of vulnerable people – the very people the UN is supposed to be protecting.

Alison Hackett

Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, Ireland

• To describe Ed Miliband’s refusal to back the Cameron government’s call for action following the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013 as “shameful”, as Matthew d’Ancona does (Don’t expect the west to act on Assad’s latest atrocity, Journal, 9 April), is to suggest that there was a realistic and sensible option.

Should we have sent one of our nuclear-armed submarines? An unfinished giant aircraft carrier (without aircraft)? Some of our elderly aircraft to engage modern Russian-made fighters? Boots on the ground (what a ghastly phrase), which lead all too often to bodies in the ground?

It is time to recognise that we are no longer a great power and that the idea of “punching above our weight” is not sensible for a boxer let alone a nation. D’Ancona correctly identifies a UN-based approach as the right one: we should thank Miliband for preventing a kneejerk reaction with extremely uncertain (but almost certainly not good) consequences.

Dr Peter B Baker

Prestwood, Buckinghamshire

• Matthew d’Ancona suggests that but for “sanctimonious procrastination” caused by memories of the Iraq war, the UK could be part of a righteous western military effort to confront the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It must surely have occurred to him that if Britain and the US had not led the attack on Iraq then Syria might well not be where it is today. And if the west charges gung-ho into yet another major Middle Eastern conflict the unforeseen consequences may be even greater and more grotesque than those of the 2003 invasion.

Joe McCarthy

Dublin, Ireland

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