Well, now, this is more than a little.....inconvenient for Barack Obama, now isn't it? After all the trouble he went to at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning to once again downplay the Islamic State's Qu'ranic atrocities and smear Christianity as ISIS's moral equivalent - the usual Islamophilic cooing he started in Cairo almost six years ago and still thinks will win America Muslim friendship and affection - here comes Jordan - a Muslim country - exhibiting the righteously raging resolve to crush ISIS once and for all that Barack Obama and the American Left find absolute and utter anathema:
Jordan is going after Islamic State group militants wherever they are and plans to "wipe them out completely," Jordan's interior minister said in comments published Saturday.
It was the latest in a series of warnings of harsh retaliation after the militants released a video of them burning a Jordanian pilot to death in a cage. The gruesome images sparked widespread anger in Jordan and the region.
Jordanian fighter jets struck ISIS weapons depots and training sites Thursday and Friday. The kingdom joined a U.S.-led military coalition in September, but said after the killing of the pilot, Lieutenant Muath al-Kaseasbeh, that it would intensify its air attacks.
Interior Minister Hussein al-Majali said al-Kaseasbeh's killing was a turning point for Jordan.
Yeah - ISIS butchered one of their own. They made it personal to the Jordanians. They're no longer just a prop in Barack Obama's make-believe "coalition," they're now directly and angrily at war with the Islamic State. And, given that honor, perverse though theirs is, still means a great deal in Muslim culture, I have no doubts when Minister al-Majali says that when his government vows to "hunt them down wherever they are" and "wipe them out completely," he means every word of it.
For now, anyway. But as Charles Krauthammer posed yesterday, what about next week? Next month? Six months from now?:
Solidarity and purpose fade quickly. Think about how post-9/11 American fervor dissipated over the years of inconclusive conflict, yielding the war fatigue of today.
First, it was six months, not "years". Second, ask your grandparents or anybody who lived through World War II what "war fatigue" really is, because nobody else living today knows a damned thing about it. And the process will be on warp drive in Jordan's case.
Or how the beheading of U.S. journalists galvanized the country against the Islamic State, yet less than five months later, the frustrating nature of that fight is creating divisions at home.
Those beheadings never galvanized anyone or anything, because Obamerikastan has no honor. The Jordanians clearly do.
But what they don't have is the same level of stability, or resources (despite Barack Obama's heroic, herculean efforts to bankrupt us) that we do:
Jordan is a more vulnerable target because, unlike the U.S., it can be destabilized....
Compared to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, similarly [artificially] created, Jordan is a wonder. But a fragile one. Its front-line troops and special forces are largely Bedouin. The Bedouin are the backbone of the Hashemite monarchy but they are a minority. Most of the population is non-indigenous Palestinians, to which have now been added 1.3 million Syrian refugees.
Thus, Jordan is being destabilized already - and not just indirectly:
Most consequential, however, is the Muslim Brotherhood with its strong Jordanian contingent — as well as more radical jihadist elements, some sympathetic to the Islamic State. An estimated 1,500 Jordanians have already joined the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Others remain home, ready to rise when the time is right.
The time is not right today. Jordanian anger is white hot. But the danger is that as the Jordanians attack — today by air, tomorrow perhaps on the ground — they risk a drawn-out engagement that could drain and debilitate the regime, one of the major bulwarks against radicalism in the entire region.
Now get out a map of Israel and take a look at the Muslim states that border her. On the north, the Jews face Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah jihadists. To their northeast, what's left of the Iranian-backed client regime of Bashar al-Assad. Within their own borders, they're surrounded by Iranian- and Muslim Brotherhood-backed Sunni jihadists in Gaza and their own stooges in the so-called "Palestinian Authority" that rules Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank). And until two years ago, the Israelis faced another Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt to their southwest. But after Egypt, Israel's longest contiguous border is with....Jordan. And if the Hashemite kingdom falls to ISIS, Jerusalem will be nose-to-nose with a nuclear-armed Sunni jihadist entity to go along with the Shiite one they were already confronting in Tehran.
The Jews are nearly, in a word, surrounded, not just by Arabs, not just by Muslims, but by jihadists. And now that the Hashemite kingdom has been goaded into fighting an all-out war against an enemy that it in all likelihood cannot defeat and has already infiltrated and undermined them from within, that encirclement of Israel will be (almost) complete. Which means that Israel would have, of necessity, to join the fight against ISIS at the same time that they're facing nuclear peril from the mullahs, which would in turn hand The One another reason to hate Benjamin Netanyahu for getting even more in the way of the ultimate Islamic Fundamentalist triumph he wants to see and that Chamberlainian piece of paper he so longs to wave.
So O's course of action would seem to be very, very simple: Get on the horn to King Abdullah and order him to stand down and follow his lead in not treating this "war on ISIS" as a real, you know, war. Remind him that it's all just supposed to be for show, a shell, an act of ongoing geopolitical performance art without any reality or substance, designed to allow the Islamic State to consolidate its gains and prepare for its next blitzkrieg - through Jordan, of course.
If President Degrade was serious about his multilateralism, he'd have much bigger guns in his holster than frickin' Jordan:
What’s missing, of course, are serious boots on the ground...[T]he Kurds, who are willing and able to fight, yet remain scandalously undersupplied by this administration.
Missing most of all is Turkey. It alone has the size and power to take on the Islamic State. But doing so would strengthen, indeed rescue, Turkey’s primary nemesis, the Iranian-backed Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.
Turkey’s price for entry was an American commitment to help bring down Assad. Obama refused. So Turkey sits it out.
Why doesn’t Obama agree? Didn’t he say that Assad must go? The reason is that Obama dares not upset Assad’s patrons, the Iranian mullahs, with whom Obama dreams of concluding a grand rapprochement.
For Obama, this is his ticket to Mt. Rushmore. So in pursuit of his Nixon-to-China Iran fantasy, Obama eschews Turkey, our most formidable potential ally against both the Islamic State and Assad.
What’s Obama left with? Fragile front-line Arab states, like Jordan.
Which are militarily worthless. Which is why Jordan's vow to "wipe out" the Islamic State is tantamount to signing the Hashemite kingdom's own death warrant. Which might help explain why O hasn't gotten on the blower to King Abdullah yet with an urge for him to "calm down".
It all depends on how much this make-believe "coalition," with its handful of "fragile front-line Arab states" matters to his big picture needle-threading of aiding the jihadist cause while simultaneously pretending to bring about a grand-unification-theory-esque, regional Middle East peace settlement that will appear to bring about universal peace while very much screwing Israel and every non-jihadist Muslim/Arab state and handing total victory to the jihadists in Tehran, Mosul, and everywhere else. Or, as Dr. K puts it, "punching his ticket to Mt.
Shockingly enough, per Andrew McCarthy, ISIS doesn't appear overly willing to play ball:
[T]he Islamic State is simply trying to blow up the coalition, which would be a useful propaganda victory. And the strategy is working. It appears at this point that only Jordan is participating in the airstrikes. While all eyes were on Jordan this week for a reaction to Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s immolation, the administration has quietly conceded that the UAE suspended its participation in bombing missions when the pilot was captured in December.
The explanation for this is obvious: The Islamic countries in the coalition know they can’t stop the Islamic State unless the United States joins the fight in earnest, and they know this president is not serious. The White House says the coalition has carried out a total of about 1,000 airstrikes in the last five months. In Desert Storm, we did 1,100 a day.
Seven strikes a day is not going to accomplish anything, especially with no troops on the ground, and thus no search-and-rescue capability in the event planes go down, as Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s did. With no prospect of winning, and with a high potential of losing pilots and agitating the rambunctious Islamists in their own populations, why would these countries continue to participate?
Why, indeed. Which means either Jordan follows through on its vow of all-out war against ISIS and loses, or their bluff is called in the absence of Red Barry moving this vaunted "coalition" out of the realm of the fictional to "[BLEEP] just got real" and they do what they have to do to have a chance of the Hashemite kingdom surviving - which is to say, drop out:
Jordan has no intention of getting into a land war the king knows he cannot win without U.S. forces leading the way. But the Islamic State does not need to lure Jordan into a land war in order to destabilize the country — it is already doing plenty of that by intensifying the Syrian refugee crisis, sending Jordanians back home from Syria as trained jihadists, and trying to assassinate Abdullah.
It is, in other words, another win-win for the Islamic State. Either the Jordanians commit suicide and their territory falls into their lap, bringing them to Israel's strategic doorstep, or Obama's "coalition" is even further exposed for the fraud it is and has always been.
Which brings us to what has always been the core point: "multilateralism" is nothing but an Obamunist excuse for its complete disinclination to resist America's enemies. The only way to resist America's enemies is for the United States to lead, period; not from "behind," which is an oxymoron, but from the front. To resume being, and acting like, the benevolent global hegemon, the global superpower, that we used to be.
It isn't about Jordan, in short, it's about America:
We know from experience that when jihadists have safe havens, they attack the United States. They now have more safe havens than they've ever had before — not just because of what the Islamic State has accomplished in what used to be Syria and Iraq (the map of the Middle East needs updating) but because of what al-Qaeda has done there and in North Africa, what the Taliban and al-Qaeda are doing in Afghanistan, and so on.
If we understand, as we by now should, what these safe havens portend, then we must grasp that the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the global jihad constitute a threat to American national security. That they also (and more immediately) threaten Arab Islamic countries is true, but it is not close to being our top concern. Ensuring our security is a concern that could not be responsibly delegated to other countries even if they had formidable armed forces — which the “coalition” countries do not.
The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.
But remember the Obama Doctrine, folks:
Every last member of this "coalition" would be well advised to head for the exits as quickly as possible, Jordan included. Because whatever backs Barack Obama may or may not have, it sure as shinola isn't theirs.
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