So why should stalwart Britain—headed by a conservative government, no less—say no to Syria while the untrustworthy and independent-minded French say yes? The simplest answer is that the British suffered through ten years of Iraq and Afghanistan and have had enough of getting involved in Middle Eastern civil wars with us, while the French, having sat out Iraq, are in a very different mood. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s support of the Libyan rebels was seen as a foreign-policy triumph—Islamists in Benghazi didn’t murder the French Ambassador.