Clearly Despicable

"The Kurdish elements within Syria are an important part of the equation in holding the line against [ISIS] and clearly the Turks, because they are physically contiguous, can assist with the supply of equipment and support to them."
British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond

"[Preventing the fall of Kobani] is not a strategic U.S. objective."
"As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani ... the original targets of our efforts have been the command and control centres, the infrastructure."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

"You can't end this terrorism just by air strikes."
"If you don't support them on the ground by co-operating with those who take up a ground operation, the air strikes won't do it."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

A Turkish soldier sits on top of a tank, with the Syrian town of Kobani in the background, as seen from the southeastern town of Suruc close to the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border October 10, 2014. (Reuters/Umit Bektas)

For cold-blooded assessments and seeming indifference it's hard to discern which of the two, Kerry or Erdogan is the more perniciously abhorrent. The United States has the momentum, having persuaded European nations, Canada and Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to bring their air assets to the fore, to bomb the 'command and control centres, the infrastructure', along, unfortunately, with farmers' wells, and hapless civilians in the wrong place at the right time.

While Turkey, a neighbour of Syria, sharing a contiguous border which was porous enough to give support and haven to the Sunni Islamists battling the Shia Syrian regime, but suddenly became impermeable when it came to the possibility that Turkey might give practical support to the Kurdish fighters struggling to keep a vicious Islamist State militia with superior arms and fighting ability from consolidating their hold on the border.

Bloodlessly, the Turkish soldiers with their massed battle tanks, raise binoculars in their front-row seat at the border, witnesses to a calamitous bloodbath that the UN envoy to Syria warns will make the massacre at Srebrenica look like foreplay. Not their business, but it does make for some quite exciting entertainment. They're there, on the border, to stop food, medical supplies, arms or Kurdish volunteers from Turkey from crossing the kilometre it would take to arrive to aid their Syrian brethren in Kobani.

Smoke rises from the Syrian town of Kobani, as seen from the southeastern town of Suruc in the Sanliurfa province near the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border October 10, 2014. (Reuters/Umit Bektas)

The United States has arranged a few bombing sessions outside Kobani, but yawns in disinterest at committing to any intervention of a more robust nature. It isn't exactly their war, although they have committed to aiding the Iraqi regime in halting the Islamic State advance. Why not focus on Kobani, then? Well, neither does the United States want especially to demolish the Sunni Islamist advance whose warriors, after all, were funded and originated through Sunni Saudi Arabia and Turkish support.

To do so would clearly mark them as a Western oppressor which went out of its way to take 'sides' in this dysfunctional sectarian war to end all wars. Except there is no war to end all wars, just wars to end all hopes that humanity might at some time when it has engaged in anti-humane enterprises too horrendously inspired by psychopathic convulsions of hatred, come to the realization that to continue is to surrender to the utmost state of nihilistic self-suicide.

Not likely to happen in the Middle East, since militant suicide has an honoured role in the political-ideological debate that simmers within Islam, where jihad is noble and nobler yet is the role of the suicidist who takes with him as many other lives as violent blasts of explosives can manage, to make of the enterprise, yet another honoured martyr whose name joins all the others in the annals of Muslim revenge against a world resistant to totalitarian subjugation to a renascent Islamist caliphate.

Turkey's Erdogan demonstrates more than adequately the simmering resentment, hatred and bids for vengeance that motivate the Middle East. He hates almost everyone; the Greeks, the Jews, the Armenians, the Kurds, his domestic critics, and above all his own Turkish Kurds who have the unmitigated effrontery to gather in their numbers to demonstrate against his clear bid to watch as Syrian Kurds are destroyed.

Kurdish protesters set fire to a barricade set up to block the street as they clash with riot police in Diyarbakir October 7, 2014. (Reuters/Stringer)

For their troubles, Turkish Kurds are roundly chastised, Erdogan-style, with upwards of 25 losing their lives in the process, as live rounds of ammunition are fired at the crowd, outraged that they must be witness to an atrocity across the border, where their government which has caused them decades of anguished oppression now indicates its readiness to continue the armed internal conflict to deny Kurds their birthright, and in the process of sturdily defending his decision to critique but remain uninvolved, criticize non-Muslim western defenders for not doing what his troops should.

As for the bland, uninvolved statements of the British and the Americans, it is difficult to discern just what they plan to accomplish in their less-than-courageous agreement that air power is their forte in this environment, when even the Arab Muslim states agreeing to support their mission, will not set military foot on the ground to rescue Kurdish Iraqis from slaughter. The Kurds, it should be recalled, give haven to all, make no distinction between Christian and Muslim, heroically defend Iraqi territory that Iraqi Arabs refuse to defend, fleeing in terror from ISIS.