HAS there suddenly occurred a stunning outbreak of good sense? The Commons voted against an attack on President Bashar Assad and it looks as if President Barack Obama – after ten days rattling his sabre and banging his drum – has backed down too.

On the face of it, this is very good news and certainly better than we might have expected before that Commons vote. We should all take a deep breath and give most humble and hearty thanks. For it seems that it dawned on politicians, both here and in the US, that neither the British nor the US public has any appetite for a further foreign war following the disastrous shambles of Iraq and Afghanistan. People realised the truth: an attack on Assad would not be an uncomplicated righteous act launched by political idealists against his tyrannical and barbarous use of chemical weapons, allegedly killing more than 1,400.

Such an attack on Assad would have been to aid and abet al Qaida and the whole mixed bag of Islamist terrorists, foreign jihadists, sectarian Sunnis and murderous Salafists.

If we had attacked – and don’t forget we might still do – the last state of Syria would have been worse than at first. It has become clear to everyone in the West – except to the wishful-thinkers in the BBC and certain sections of the press – that the regimes which have followed, or threaten to follow, the toppling of the North African and Middle Eastern dictators are worse than the dictators themselves.

The Iraq which we helped “liberate” is now hell on earth filled with rival terrorist groups and suicide bombers and it is rapidly becoming the focus for a full-blown sectarian war between Shia and Sunni Muslims – a conflict which is 500 years older than the divide between Catholics and Protestants in Europe and ten times more savage.

Libya post-Gaddafi is lawless and violent owing to the revival of ancient tribal feuds which the other “liberation” we effected there achieved. If the military coup in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood had failed, that country would be on the edge of an incalculable catastrophe. Fortunately, Egyptians in very large numbers showed that they have no enthusiasm for the turning of their country into a fundamentalist Muslim state.

But now, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, we have entered a world of yet more “unknown unknowns”. For what will Syria look like six months from today if Assad’s regime survives?

And will the West’s obvious reluctance to get militarily involved in the region make an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities more likely? Israel must be thinking that it may not be able to rely on Western intervention.

An unexpected benefit of last week’s No vote in the House of Commons is that it almost certainly precipitated the downfall of David Cameron – the most un-Tory Conservative Prime Minister we have ever seen.

Those members of his own party who courageously voted against his wishes now know that they will be reshuffled, purged or otherwise side-lined. So they have nothing to lose. Consequently, they will be emboldened to oppose Mr Cameron on other matters. Our continued membership of the EU is the most important.

One swallow does not make a summer. And perhaps the one outbreak of good sense is as much as we can reasonably expect. But is there a glimmer of hope at last in what has been the very long period of Britain’s political darkness?