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   This in an interesting interview but the tone the interviewer’s speech and his palpable bias, by the end, ruined the credibility of the whole thing.

   It came over as Party Political Broadcast on behalf of Assad.

   Over emphasis on ‘ALLEGED’ chemical weapons attacks, ‘SUPPOSED to have been committed by Assad set the tone from the start. We don’t know for certain, but it’s more reasonable to use the words ‘possible’ or ‘likely’, and not to weight them with such heavy intonation.

   The interview lost all credibility when the obvious pro Assad bias reverted from the ‘covert’ to the ‘overt’.

   We were told that some woman in Syria had said that 70 of the 103 missiles had been shot down by the Syrians without Russian assistance, and the interviewer treated that as evidence that the mission had been a ‘failure’.

   What happened to ‘ALLEGED’ and ‘SUPPOSED’ there? Bishop didn’t even challenge the point and carried on, as if this rumour from one woman was all now established fact.

   He even threw in the aside that there have been allegations from within Syria that these targets were ‘anti venom’ factories rather than chemical weapons ones!!

   There’s also no evidence to support the allegation that ‘interests on the ground in Syria’ have persuaded Trump to ‘change his policy’. In any case ‘has he changed his policy’? Has Trump ever said that Syria would be permitted to use chemical weapons with impunity?

   What is the point in being a party to Chemical Weapons Treaty if you don’t act when someone violates it? All you’d have done is to unilaterally disarm yourself!!

   Trump, Mrs May, and Boris Johnson have all made it clear that this was a response to the use of chemical weapons, and was NOT intervention in the war itself. So this in NOT reversion to the warmongering policy which ‘liberals’ have been pursuing in the past.

   Perhaps Donald Trump has modified his approach a bit, simply because he now has better intelligence information available to him than he did when he was a mere candidate for the Republican Nomination, with only an outside chance of winning.

   Talk of these strikes risking ‘World War Three’ is also laughable. Trump signalled his intentions well in advance, and Russia was given time to get out of the way. There’s been no escalation since.

   One valid point made however, is to alert listeners to the fact that we shouldn’t always believe what we hear from UN observers. The UN is seen by some, as a saintly organisation to which we should all pay unquestioning homage.

   But sometimes they get the facts wrong, and sometimes their informants deliberately misrepresent them. Is there any evidence they have this time? No!

   The biased conspiracy theories peddled in this interview are baseless in evidence, and the talk of this starting another wave of refugees arriving in the EU are rubbish.

   You can, invent any sort of conspiracy theory and make it sound plausible, and destroying chemical weapons installations is likely to reduce the risk of refugees coming, not increase it.

   Another of the alleged reasons for questioning the merits of this response, namely that it would have been irrational for Assad to take the risk in the first place is also baseless.

   Assad would have taken the risk because he has been led to believe that he can get away with it. If he was responsible , then letting him get away with it again, merely increases the certainty that he will carry on doing it.

   This was a modest and proportionate response to disabuse the Syrians of any notion that they have permission fro the West to use chemical weapons. Perhaps it will work perhaps it won’t. It won’t have done any real harm.

   The potential reward to risk balance was positive.

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