Turkey Supplants IS.

The Middle East, being one of the very cradles of civilization, has always been a grand theater of life's contests: wondrous men putting up magnificent cities and temples and barbarous hordes from the other side of the divide thundering through endless vistas to lay waste the same monuments with relish. The good guys have been in remission of late, we all know why, what is infinitely more baffling is the profusion and smooth succession of characters all too happy to sustain the enduring tradition of destruction and pillage.
The Islamic State, of very fresh or even active memory, are not even the latest monsters: the new fiends in town have their camps in Turkey and the Genghis Khan has a reincarnate in one Mr Erdogan, a rouser of the rabble as loud and violent as they come.
Luckily, we  are in the post-internet world and we don't have to wait for a hundred or thousand years for a great historian to tickle our imagination with the chronicles of what is presently going on in Syria. Hot, immediate news are replete with Turkish troops, tanks and warplanes committing appalling atrocities on Kurdish populations and monuments on the other side of the border with Syria. It isn't peasant viewing seeing tanks of German manufacture and jets of American provenance carry out assaults on the great Hittite temple of Ain Dara, a monument famous for its huge, carved basalt lions. Islamic State terrorists at least knew which temples and statues they were rigging up with explosives, how such discrimination could be achieved by pilots flying thousands of feet above must necessarily approach rocket science; an even harder task awaits us explaining to our descendants our criminal silence over the bombing of the Ain Dara treasures, priceless structures put up in the first millennium BC. A time ancestors of Mr Trump, Angela Merkel, Theresa May were crawling on all fours in open forests. Guys who couldn't even afford sheepskin. The genes to summon courage to decisively confront Erdogan are simply not embedded anywhere, from Washington to Russia. So Mr Trump could only urge Turkey to 'de-escalate, limit its military options and avoid civillian casualties.' If this is not an echo from a pre-historic whimper, I don't know what it is. As usual, it were better if Mr Trump had not said anything at all.
More sacking and pillage await the monuments and treasures of Syria. There are just too many cowards waiting to be goaded by our collective silence and inaction in face of  of evil.