“Thinking about Syria and reading the commentary about whether anything can be done I am reminded that the biggest lesson I have learnt as an MP and as CEO of BICOM is this: as an international community we constantly overestimate what we can achieve. I have learnt – from the Iraq intervention and from working in the Israeli-Palestinian arena – that we assume the ‘international community’ has capabilities that, quite frankly, we haven’t seen evidence for.

For example, during the 2008-9 war in Gaza I came up against a widespread misapprehension that there were better options there for the taking. However, I learnt that in this connected and complex world of ours you can very rarely do anything successful on your own.

Israel couldn’t stop the rockets unless she could stop the smuggling, but she couldn’t stop the smuggling without Egypt’s support. But Egypt couldn’t do it on its own without the help of other African and Arab states, and they couldn’t do it without the help of the international community due to the laws that govern the high seas, amongst other things.

Even when after the war in Gaza when there was international agreement and political will to take on the issue of smuggling, the will soon ran out and nothing got done; we still have smuggling of arms and Islamic Jihad in Gaza is now at least as well-armed as Hamas.”

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