“As understatements go it was hard to beat the one coming from a Western official who spoke to The Times this week about what the Syrian authorities were up to. ‘We don’t know whether they intend to use chemical weapons,’ he said, ‘but obviously it would be problematic if they did.’

Just how ‘problematic’ was well illustrated to viewers when, on Monday night, they saw John Simpson, the BBC correspondent, returning to the village of Halabja which, in 1988, was attacked with chemical weapons by the forces of Saddam Hussein. Descending into a cellar where a Kurdish family had sheltered…

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