The Naivety of William Hague.

You'd think that after Al-Qaeda in Iraq admitted complicity in setting up the Al-Nusra Front, after the Free Syrian Army has been known to commit atrocities yelling 'Allahu Akhbar' that our Foreign Secretary would be a little more circumspect about shipping arms to these savages but no, he's still thinking about it. This, from The Spectator today:

William Hague tries to reassure on 'naïve' Syria arms plan Should the UK arm the Syrian rebels? William Hague thinks so, but it turns out neither his MPs nor the public are convinced. YouGov polling earlier this month found on 17 per cent of voters supported sending arms, and 56 per cent opposed the measure. Tory MPs such as John Redwood, John Baron and Julian Lewis today said the plan 'might make it worse rather than better', would 'escalate the violence and escalate the suffering' and that it was 'naïve'. Hague himself insisted that no decision to supply arms had yet been taken, and that the EU decision to not renew the arms embargo was a way of putting pressure on all sides to attend a peace conference next month. He said: 'I can say, as again I said in Parliament last week, that we would only send arms to anybody in carefully controlled circumstances, in company with other countries and with accordance with international law. So I think people can be reassured about that.' Many MPs will be pressing for an opportunity to at least debate the next step in this conflict in the Commons. And when they do, one of the key questions will be what 'carefully controlled circumstances' really means? How can the government really control those weapons once they have been handed over to rebels, even if those taking them are from trusted groups? It will be very difficult for Hague to give any guarantees when reassuring parliamentarians.

Never mind the 'carefully controlled circumstances', just who are these 'trusted groups'? To what outer reaches of delusion has Mr Hague journeyed to make John Redwood look like the voice of reason? Is Mr Hague doing this because doing this is more like doing politics than would be doing nothing? If so, & if he does eventually ship British weapons to the Syrian jihadis, then he will have blood on his hands because everyone, as YouGov has shown can see that those weapons will eventually be used to kill western soldiers.