Last year made history as, in a House of Commons vote on Thursday, August 29, PM Cameron’s face said it all, when his coalition government suffered a humiliating defeat when MPs voted 285 to 272 against the US proposal to bomb Syria, which would no doubt meant both UK and US military boots on the ground in that country.

The majority of ISIS Islamic state fighters that have beheaded western captives are the result of a ragtag anti-Assad army, supplied with US arms and equipment purely for political reasons to try to topple President Assad and thus bring about another US-inspired regime change.

The US is now bombing the very Islamic regime ISIS which it did so much to create and, more humiliatingly still, its own weaponry that it supplied it with.

However, it is the Syrian people who are suffering the consequences of the decisions taken on the US Capitol Hill, with the likes of John McCain and Victoria Nuland constantly beating the drums of war, while at the same time being cheerleaders for regime change and destabilisation of sovereign countries.

Last week saw yet another refugee ship, the Ezadeen, abandoned by the crew off Italy with 360 migrants on board who were mostly Syrians.

This was on top of another abandoned ship containing 796 migrants earlier in the week.

It was yet again a sickening sight to see women with babies and elderly people fleeing for their lives from US-instigated war in their homeland.

And it would be nothing other than poetic justice to abandon the likes of the US hawks on Capitol hill to a similar fate by setting them adrift in an abandoned rowing boat, so as to give them some insight in to the suffering that their jingoistic policies are causing for innocent people.

When is the US going to leave other countries at peace to shape their own destinies and more to the point, the monumental vote of August 2014 hopefully means that at last this country may have seen sense, and will no longerfollow their war like tendencies to feed the profits of their giant arms corporations.

If being drawn in to US-inspired wars with perpetuity is what the so-called special relationship signifies the sooner it is ended, the better.

G A Woodward Nelson Street, Swindon