Visitors to Aleppo used to stay in Barons Hotel. Sunlight didn’t seem to get through the windows but it was picturesque. Lawrence of Arabia had signed the visitors’ book. An Armenian family owned and ran the place. Living there more or less permanently was the British writer Patrick Seale. When I first went there, he admired Hafiz Assad, who in the early Sixties had staged a coup and ran a police state. Seale was reputed to have received payment of $1 million for his biography of Hafiz Assad. Undoubtedly well informed, he was putting the argument in a sophisticated form that a country like Syria is so fragmented and diverse that only a tyrant is able to rule it. In this view, killing and torturing anyone and everyone who wants a share of power is therefore an obligation; the absolutely certain alternative is anarchy. It’s pointless to be sorry, that’s just the way things are. If he were still alive, I feel sure that Seale would be defending Bashar Assad, who inherited a dynastic tyranny from his father Hafiz and maintains it by doing whatever has to be done.

In this view, literally nothing that empowers the tyrant is so shocking that it can’t be done. Everyday crime and horror in Aleppo prove it. Taboos are for the weaklings and the defeated. If people of some other tribe or sect or political persuasion have to see their children dead under the rubble of their own bombed-out houses, they are bound to understand that they can expect no mercy just because they are different. Ceasefires are tools of deception. Lying is strategic. Burning captive women or executing young men on the suspicion that they might be rebels is an exemplary assertion of authority. Shell with howitzers the great Ummayed mosque, Aleppo’s finest historic monument, and the ruins are a lesson. Identity is exclusive: Sunni fights Shiite, Kurd fights Arab, Arab fights Turk, Turk fights Kurd, and they’ll continue until the Kremlin installs its chosen tyrant or the White House at last comes up with a policy.