The analogy between Iraq and Syria may initially seem shallow and facile. There is a different president in the White House - one less famously ignorant and less jingoistic in his rhetoric. The proposal is not a boots-on-the-ground, democracy-at-gunpoint, Bremer-style Green Zone commitment to invasion and military governance leading the transition to democracy. Rather, it is a series of limited strikes. We even know for a fact that weapons banned by international law are present and have been used. We haven't heard much this time about the regime's support for radical Islamism - either because we are no longer so ready to accept these allegations without evidence or because al-Qaeda is, inconveniently, on our side.

However, even if we ignore the fears of Pentagon analyst Chris Harmer that these strikes lack strategic objectives and may be useless or even counterproductive, the significant lobby arguing for opposition responsibility for the attacks - including two of the UN inspectors whose conclusions still have not been published - and US prevarication over whether further action may be considered if strikes fail, such comparisons are missing the point. The question is - why now? Why are we fetishising a weapon that killed 1,429 people in a war which has claimed 100,000 lives and displaced millions, creating one of the largest refugee crises in history? Where does the much-discussed red line lie, which sanctions killing by American missiles to prevent killing by Syrian artillery? A recurrent argument has been the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians which chemical weapons violate; how exactly does indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas really differ from indiscriminate gassing? How does the deployment of chemical weaponry by Israel in Gaza, or the disastrous American drone programme which continues to kill ten civilians for every one combatant, fail to violate these very same principles?

The sad reality is that there is no red line. It would be incredibly cynical to suggest that the individuals at work to promote the Syrian intervention in Washington are not genuinely concerned with the human nature of the crisis. I am sure that John Kerry has convinced himself that punitive strikes to prevent the use of chemical weapons will in some way prevent further thousands of deaths at the hands of the Syrian regime or the rebels.

Nonetheless, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the moral arguments marshalled by Obama and his partisans conceal the fact that even if the conflict may have begun as an inspiring attempt by everyday Syrians to seize back power from an oppressive elite, it was rapidly co-opted by the US as a proxy war against Russian and Iranian interests in the region, represented by the Assad government. And it’s important to emphasise that Russia and Iran are hardly innocent either. Both of these states not only facilitated the continuing existence of the Ba’thist regime, but since the beginning of the war have defended its bloody suppression of the rebellion and escalated the internal arms race by providing the army with increasingly high-tech weaponry.

This is hardly a new tactic. To justify the first Gulf War in 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was demonised and the American intervention painted as pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship; the actual result of the war was thousands of deaths, the destruction of millions of dollars’ worth of Iraqi infrastructure and crippling economic sanctions which prevented any kind of reconstruction or resurgence as a local power. The Iraqis remained saddled with Saddam, a ruler who had been provided with vast amounts of economic and diplomatic support over the course of the devastating Iran-Iraq War. This support included an episode in which US diplomats were ordered to scupper a UN resolution condemning his usage of such weapons, perhaps because US companies had sold them to him in the first place. The sequel in 2002 was justified by appeals to the witch-hunt mentality of post-9/11 America; Saddam was linked, if by slightly unclear means, to al-Qaeda, toppled rapidly and replaced by an American military administration which managed to alienate practically every major faction in Iraq, staying just long enough to grant as many contracts as possible to American companies and facilitate Iraq’s decline into bloody sectarian strife.

In fact, perhaps the only thing about American policy in the Middle East which stands out more than its cynicism is its sheer cack-handedness - ongoing American drone strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere serve to rob local governments of their legitimacy and drive exasperated individuals into radicalism even as they kill more unfortunate goat-herders and children than they do their actual targets. Meanwhile, Western intervention in Libya has led to rampant warlordism and a surge in al-Qaeda activity. Not a single US intervention since 9/11 has failed to increase support for Islamic radicalism.

The Syrian crisis may differ from American activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It may have its own unique characteristics. Ultimately, however, any intervention, no matter how subtle the means deployed, forms part of a broader picture of Western interference on Western terms which shows that now as much as ever, foreign interests remain deeply entrenched in the Middle East. No local conflict can be seen outside this context.