The Syrian dictator’s downfall is a decade overdue, writes Alasdair Murray, while Carol Hedges deplores far-right responses on social media

Regarding your editorial (The Guardian view on the fall of Assad: a tumultuous, fragile hope in Syria, 8 December), the downfall of Bashar al-Assad is welcome, but it is more than a decade overdue. The scenes we have witnessed this week could have taken place in 2013, if western leaders had only shown the courage and resolve to take action against Assad after he used chemical weapons on his own people. It is entirely plausible that, if the US and UK had given full military support to the rebels in 2013, the regime might have fallen, and the war ended then rather than continuing for another 11 years.

Instead, the following decade saw thousands dead, countless more imprisoned and tortured, the rise and fall of Islamic State, and a refugee crisis that shook Europe. The failure to intervene in Syria in 2013 stands as one of the worst decisions in recent British foreign policy history, every bit as wrong as the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. The first tragic mistake led to the second.