Blowback on a NATO beach

Turkish security forces patrolled the shores of MuÄŸla, finding the bodies of several refugees, including a child, who drowned and were washed ashore.
(Image by DHA photos)   Details   DMCA

We've had it coming. And when it came, virtually the whole planet reacted with stunned silence. Sometimes it takes just a photograph to put a noxiously complex version of hell in perspective.

Little did Nilufer Demir, 29, the female photojournalist of the Turkish Dogan News agency know that the moment she saw little Aylan Kurdi, 3, washed ashore at the Ali Hoca Burnu beach near Bodrum, she would be making history.

Aylan is alone, as if suspended by the immense solitude of death, just as his family's dream of offering him a new life in a new continent away from death and destruction was about to be fulfilled. It's as if his lone lifeless body at the shores of a NATO beach was also about to prefigure the death of Europe -- or the death of a once pan-European dream of solidarity and compassion.

Hannah Arendt once wrote movingly about the banality of evil, referring to the mechanism of fascism and Nazism. Aylan's lifeless body now illustrates the banality of an evil he was trying to flee: the "arc of instability," a Pentagon self-fulfilling prophecy.

So to put hell in perspective we must retrace some steps of the arc.

Back to Shock and Awe

We've had it coming when the "we're the new OPEC" Bush administration invaded, occupied and destroyed Iraq -- creating the set-up for the establishment of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

We've had it coming when the Petraeus surge bribed Sunnis to half-heartedly fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq -- which then took its time to reorganize in the heart of the desert, change its name to Islamic State and plot a comeback.

We've had it coming when NATO, enthusiastically "led" by London and Paris, and allied with hardcore Salafi-jihadis, set out to duly "liberate" Libya into a failed state run by militias.

We've had it coming when the Obama administration, allied with the usual Persian Gulf monarchical lackeys, sold an Arab Spring myth to the world by encouraging "moderate" rebels to "liberate" Syria into a wasteland.

We've had it coming when US intelligence supported or at best "ignored" the jihadi free flow between Libya and Syria.

We've had it coming when the most powerful satellite surveillance system ever simply failed to detect a gleaming white Toyota column of the rebranded ISIS/ISIL/Daesh crossing the Syrian desert into Iraq to take over Mosul.

We've had it coming when ISIS/ISIL/Daesh -- following a willful decision taken in Washington -- was allowed to tear Sykes-Picot to shreds, taking over large swathes of both Syria and Iraq by guile and terror tactics.

We've had it coming when ISIS/ISIL/Daesh took Kobani, in Syrian Kurdistan, just to be dislodged essentially by PKK/YPG Kurd militias, not by US bombing raids.

We've had it coming when ISIS/ISIL/Daesh gloated over its prowess by profiting not only from oil smuggling and a micromanaged theatre of cruelty -- videotaped beheadings, the destruction of archeological pearls -- but also wreaking havoc enough to vastly increase the numbers of an uncontainable refugee crisis.

Aylan was a Syrian Kurd fleeing from ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.