“William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has announced that Britain is going to make “more active efforts” to protect the lives of rebels fighting the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. This means supplying non-lethal military equipment such as body armour and armoured cars, as well as testing equipment to find evidence of chemical weapons. We might regret the fact that Britain has to get involved at all in a civil war that finds both sides compromised by allegations of human rights abuses, but standing by and watching the slaughter unfold is no longer an option.”