AROUND five million Syrians have been displaced, to use the current euphemism, within their own country.

They are without homes or any kind of safety. They are desperate to quit their ravaged country. But they cannot because of the intensity of the various rebel movements' fight back against the odious regime of Bashar al-Assad.

These five million people are potential refugees; life would be better for them, if only marginally, if they could mange to escape to southern Turkey, eastern Lebanon or northern Jordan.

More than two million Syrians are already refugees, A million of them are in Lebanon, a small country with a population of just under five million.

Imagine a million homeless, imperilled people flooding into Scotland in a short space of time.

Another million or so are in Jordan, also a small country. Turkey has received fewer refugees, though it is better equipped to cope, being a large state with a strong economy. It is also has growing strategic significance. Even so, there are big strains in Turkey too.

The most helpful thing that states such as Britain and France can do to ease this dire and worsening situation is to provide aid, lots of it, for the refugees and the countries that are receiving them. The last thing we should be doing is sending arms to Syria, a war-torn country that is already flooded with weapons of all kinds.

But this is exactly what the British and the French currently want to do. We, and the French, are trying to get the EU to overturn its embargo on sending weapons to the rebels in Syria. Have our leaders thought this through? They may wish to topple Assad – what decent person wouldn't? – but have they considered who might replace him? Has it occurred to them that their bellicose approach – it almost amounts to war by proxy – might end up with a regime in Syria that treated its own citizens even more inhumanely?

The various groups resisting the Assad regime – which of course is repellent – are a dangerous mixture. Some of them have close links with al Qaeda. Many of them are not natural friends of the West; some of them are directly hostile to Iran. Few people in Britain would defend the current Iranian regime, but do we want to see Syria at war with Iran?

Iran and Russia are both indirectly supporting the Assad regime. If Britain and France were to start supporting and arming rebel factions in Syria, we would in effect be challenging Iran and Russia.

That might just be justifiable if it were in our own best interests to do so, but right now it would be directly inimical to our own interests.

What we should be doing, as decent liberal states, is providing aid for the millions of bereft human beings who have fled from Syria – and even more importantly, somehow trying help the millions of displaced people still within Syria. In other words, humane, decent and useful activity.

We should not be arming anyone in Syria.Yet that is what William Hague, our Foreign Secretary, proposes. I used to think Mr Hague was an impressive, intelligent politician. Now he is becoming alarmingly like a poor man's Tony Blair, irresponsibly wanting to add fuel to the fire, wherever in the world the fire might be.

This is not statesmanship. It is idiocy.

Mr Hague should instead be paving the way for the proposed major conference on Syria which may take place in Geneva next month. The US and Russia – who are of course the major external players– might just be able, through diplomacy, to work out some kind of consensus on how to deal with Assad. But if this conference is to be successful, Iran will have to be involved, and that might be unacceptable to the Americans.

Britain might find a role as a broker between the Americans and the Russians. This is the sort of work, involving hard, gritty diplomacy, that Mr Hague should be engaged in. He should forget about arming rebels, and get on with the talking.