France, Britain and the US appear, instead, to have struck empty buildings.Perhaps that is just as well, although it brings into sharp relief the absurdity of the action, which was ostensibly a response to a poison gas attack in Douma on April 7, that reportedly claimed 70 lives and caused hundreds of injuries.Chemical weapons are undoubtedly a curse, and it is acknowledged that their use in Syria has not been restricted to the Assad regime. But whether in that particular context or beyond it, Syria’s capacity as a potential crucible for the next world war has been far from anchor bolts exhausted.One of the reasons behind the comprehensive confusion over Syria is that the ever-present question is not who to believe more, but who to disbelieve less. At the same time, though, this week they delayed permission for inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to visit the purportedly affected area, sparking suspicions of a coordinated cover-up.

Hollow demonstrations of military superiority by powers that pretend to take the moral high ground but are unwilling to consult their Parliaments beforehand, let alone demonstrate their concern for beleaguered Syrians by opening their doors a bit wider for refugees, are supremely unhelpful. Both Syria and Russia have denied that any such atrocity took place. It is unclear what the OPCW representatives might find in Douma, which has been under Syrian-Russian control for 10 days, after Jaish al-Islam, the Saudi-backed Islamist group that occupied a part of the area on the outs******ts of Damascus, accepted a deal that included safe pasغير مجاز مي باشدe to Idlib province.One of the three sites that came under attack was claimed by the Western powers to be a repository for chemical weapons.

In Vietnam, meanwhile, the indiscriminate spraying of Agent Orange not only accounted for hundreds of thousands of deaths, but children are still being born with deformities associated with their parents’ exposure to the deadly defoliant.Everyone involved in the mess — from the Assad regime and its smorgasbord of opponents to the US-led Western allies, Russia, ***, Turkey, Israel, the Saudis, UAE and Qatar — has an axe to grind.By arrangement with Dawn.It’s interesting that even Moscow has been reluctant to cite the warning, perhaps recognising that it could be construed as evidence of collusion. The only possible road to peace in the country carved out a century ago by Anglo-French diktat lies through dedicated diplomacy, involving concessions and compromises that none of the antagonists appears to be inclined towards for the time being.More than four years ago, Syria supposedly surrendered all its stockpiles of chemical weapons, which were subsequently destroyed under international supervision.