HOW are you enjoying the run-up to Armageddon?

I ask only because as you read this column we may have entered the first phase of the Third World War. President Barack Obama seems hell-bent on starting it.

This is not a fantasy nightmare on the part of your Tuesday columnist designed to scare the wits out of you. Let me instead quote the universally respected MP and Father of the House Sir Peter Tapsell, speaking in the Commons last week: “As the Syrian tragedy has unfolded, I have always had the Armageddon question in the back of my mind, which I shall now, in an understated form, put to the Prime Minister, if I may.

“If the Americans illegally bombard the Assad forces and Assad legally invites the Russians in to degrade the rebels, what will Nato do?”

If – when, rather – the Syrian regime is attacked, it will retaliate. And the Syrians have the fire power to do so: advanced Russian surface- to-air missiles and, more significantly, missiles capable of obliterating targets throughout the Middle East and particularly in their next-door-neighbour Israel.

Then what? You tell me.

The scenario is not improved by the sickening sight of Senator John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, racing around the world’s capitals and ramping up enthusiasm for this proposed catastrophic war.

Mr Kerry is surely the man for whom the term “whited sepulchre” was coined. He’s the guy who picked up five medals for a mere four months’ service in Vietnam, only to return from that conflict to join the US anti-war bandwagon and in an extravagant public gesture throw his medals away while describing the campaign in which he had fought with such hypocritical zeal as “a pointless waste” and accusing his country of war crimes. Just the sort of man you would expect to be appointed to high office by President Obama.

The US President said: “The world’s conscience and credibility is at stake following the chemical weapons attack by Assad on his own people.” Come off it, Mr President. Over the past two years more than 100,000 Syrians have been killed in their civil war and so many millions displaced that even the negligent ingenues and career bureaucrats in the UN are referring to it as “the crisis of the century”.

If that didn’t offend the world’s conscience and provoke it to action, why should the deaths of a further 1,459 people in a chemical attack create a ripple?

An attack on Assad will have unlimited consequences which no one can predict. The very least that will happen is that many more people on both sides will die. There will be retaliation against the US, perhaps directly via those Russian weapons but certainly indirectly by Syrian and Iranian proxies and terrorist groups. Americans should not think themselves secure against such reprisals.

They didn’t foresee the Al Qaida attacks in East Africa in 1998, or 9/11 or even the murder of US ambassadors in Benghazi last year.

But we may be sure the enemies of the US have their plans well in hand.

But the overriding question in considering making war is: “What’s the use?” To punish Assad and, ideally, help topple him. Then what? Then the current chaos and misery that is Syria will be intensified a thousand fold as that country will be controlled by the barbaric Sunni terrorists, Salafists and Al Qaida groups who presently form the opposition.

If that happens I don’t rule out Sir Peter’s prediction of Armageddon.