Several commentators have already evoked the parallel between Kobane 2014 and Warsaw 1944, when the Red Army stood still outside the Polish capital for two months as the Wehrmacht and the SS smashed the Polish Home Army's uprising. The Polish resistance was not Communist, so Stalin preferred to let it be liquidated. By the end of the uprising, most of Warsaw lay in ruins. Tens of thousands of civilians were brutally slaughtered in a deliberate attempt to break the resistance's will to fight. Then the Soviets moved in.

Though Turkey is not the Soviet Union and IS does not have the destructive power of an SS Panzer division, one can see why that comes to mind, watching Turkish tanks stand idly by on the border overlooking Kobane. The fall of the town would be a demoralising defeat for Kurdish forces, which in Kobane are affiliated to the PKK. Turkey's army can always push back later — and with its stature as the Middle East's largest and best — equipped military, it would have no difficulty in smashing IS if it wished to.

But the government in Ankara finds more ideological affinity with IS — a Sunni Islamist movement — than with the Kurds, whose nationalist aspirations threaten the survival of a unified Turkey more than a band of savages with scimitars and an abundance of zeal.

It is hard to see why. The PKK's supremo, Abdullah Öcalan, has been languishing in a Turkish jail since 1999. And the shifting sands of the Middle East, with the collapse of the Iraqi state and the disintegration of Syria into a bloody pandemonium, should make the Kurds the least of Turkey's worries. Making Turkey the saviour of the Kurds in Kobane also cannot hurt the peace process; and it would give Turkey a stake in the future of Syria's Kurdish areas.

As for Washington, it should stop pretending that this crisis can be solved by retraining an Iraqi military that just melted away despite a decade of American support. Or that letting Assad stay can help thaw relations with Tehran. Or that if it talks of inclusiveness to Baghdad and Damascus the Middle East will somehow shed its old habits. Or that Obama's new-found militant rhetoric against IS is a substitute for the grim business of war.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has largely stood by as genocide and ethnic cleansing ravaged Europe's backyard in the Balkans, Africa's Great Lakes region, and now Syria and Iraq. Arthur Koestler called Soviet inaction in Warsaw "one of the major infamies of this war". Let Kobane not become another one in our own time.