I would prefer to be wrong

But I fear I won't be. It's already looking perilously late to get our collective asses, whom the Guardian is correctly exhorting to action, in gear.

Rawnsley is more pointed about the west's predicament:

Some of these dilations are a legacy of the Iraq war. Eight years on from the invasion, the calamitous errors after the toppling of Saddam continue to poison the cause of liberal interventionism. The shadow of Iraq makes it harder to win the argument that both self-interest and our moral values demand a response when a dictator is brutalising his people on our doorstep. In fear of another Iraq, the west risks repeating a different, earlier mistake: the divided and impotent European response to the slaughter in the Balkans in the 1990s.

If it weren't for Iraq, we would have been in there by now.

The process is what was supposed to protect us. The abasement of our former leaders becomes our abasement, and others will suffer and die needlessly as a result.

The circle is complete.