Emotion vies with indignation but the horror is just too big for words. Four times within a few weeks the murderers have staged their sinister act. After two US reporters and a British NGO volunteer beheaded somewhere in Syria, a French citizen, Hervé Gourdel, was barbarously killed in Algeria – how many miles away?

No doubt the kidnapers, who claim to belong to “the Islamic State”, meant to break into the parliamentary debate on France’s commitment to the new military intervention in Iraq. The extremists, who persecute the civilian population on either side of the Euphrates, did not want to stop the military operation; they only wanted to add a bloody note to the picture of a deeply chaotic Middle-East. For the military option chosen by the United States, supported by the French president and government, the Qatari emir, and the king of Saud Arabia amounts to playing into the hands of IS fundamentalists whose distinct prospect is to thrive on the devastated fields. Hervé Gourdel is a victim to this frontal strategy and the violence that it is bound to unleash far and wide.

And on that day no doubt of sad memory in History, the French Parliament was deprived of the right to deliberate on France’s participation in a new war. Notwithstanding the fact that the times are frought with perils, especially on the outskirts of Europe. The word WAR is currently vindicated, repeated almost with relish by its promoters. War has become a trite word, one of several methods, maybe even the first that will come to mind, especially when home policies bring no results and no source of pride.

In the course of their successive military interventions, each ending in no fair resolution, the US and its western allies have created monsters they now vow to annihilate by using the very methods that generated them. The result is, alas, only too predictable.

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