Sorting Syria

Daveybloke's Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns and sometime special nuncio to Belize, Willem den Haag, has been sparing the rod with Syria on the compassionate grounds that even Johnny Arab can get down the right prong of a fork if given a fair crack of the truncheon. According to a Syrian human rights organisation, Bashar al-Assad's government has killed off several hundred people during the past month's protests, and has arrested several hundred more who took unfair advantage of the repeal of the emergency laws which had been in force since 1962. Few British governments and almost no Conservative ones would want to kick a chap who's having trouble with protesters and has been forced against his will to forego that most precious political gift, the Enabling Act; accordingly, den Haag proclaimed that Assad could be imagined as a reformer and that part of his difficulty was that his "power depends on a wider group of people in his own family and, of course, other members of government". In other words, the Syrian government is killing people because Assad is too good a family man and not enough of a dictator. Although Syria is not subject to a no-fly zone or the illegal escalation thereof, den Haag also denied that the Government was being softer on Syria than on Libya, since apparently harsh language can work just as well if not better than dropping bombs on people.