The most important point about the impending missile strikes in Syria by the US, Britain and France is being missed, despite wall-to-wall media coverage.

The purported aim of the attack is to deter President Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons as a weapon in the Syrian civil war. But the history of this savage conflict, in which half a million people have died, shows that all sides employ every possible method to kill or maim their enemies. Preventing the use of one type of armament, and that not the most important, will make little difference.

The only way to stop the deployment of poisoned gas in Syria is to stop the use of all weapons, by bringing the war to an end. But in the run-up to military action against Assad’s forces, there is depressingly little discussion about how this might be done.

Insofar as there is discussion, it is to the effect that either the air strikes will not change the balance of power on the ground, or they will somewhat weaken Assad and prevent him winning a decisive victory in the war.

This is the same old discredited policy that the US and its western allies have pursued for the last five years, since they realised that the armed opposition to Assad was dominated by various al-Qaeda clones, such as Isis and al-Nusra, which would replace him if he ever fell from power.

In cooperation with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they helped the rebels sufficiently to keep the war going against Assad, but not enough for them to win. As early as August 2012, a report by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, stated that “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”.

It is worth reading in full the DIA report which forecasts “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria”. This was two years before Isis declared the Islamic State.