Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity?
While the video might firm up the faith of fanatics, would it not evoke rage and revulsion across the Islamic world? After all, this was a Sunni Muslim, in a cage, being burned alive.
As of now, this cruel killing seems to have backfired. Jordan is uniting behind King Abdullah’s determination to exact “earth-shattering” retribution.
Which raises again the questions: Why did ISIS do it? What did they hope to gain? Evil though they may be, they are not stupid.
Surely, they knew the reaction they would get?
Several explanations come to mind.
First, ISIS is hurting. It lost the battle for Kobane on the Turkish border to the Kurds; it is bleeding under U.S. air attacks; and it is stymied in Iraq. It wanted to lash out in the most dramatic and horrific way.
Second, ISIS wants to retain the title of the most resolute and ruthless of the Islamist radicals, a title temporarily lost to al-Qaida, which carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. This horror has put ISIS back in the headlines and on global television.
Third, ISIS wants to pay back King Abdullah, a Sunni and descendant of the Prophet, for joining America in bombing them.
Fourth, this may have been a provocation to cause the king to put his monarchy on the line and plunge Jordan into all out war against the Islamic State.
For history teaches that wars often prove fatal to monarchies. In the Great War of 1914-1918, the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns, the Romanovs and Ottomans, all went down.
The terrorists of ISIS may believe that stampeding Abdullah into fighting on the side of the “Crusaders” may prove destabilizing to his country and imperil the Hashemite throne.
For, though Jordanians may be united today, will they support sending their sons into battle as allies of the Americans and de facto allies of Bashar Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran?
There are reasons why Sunni nations like Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have not committed more openly and decisively to the war on ISIS, and instead prod the Americans to send their troops to eradicate the Islamic State.
To many Sunni nations, Assad and the Shia Crescent of Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut are the greater threat. Indeed, until recently, as Joe Biden pointed out last October, the Turks, Saudis and United Arab Emirates were providing clandestine aid to ISIS.
Biden was forced to apologize, but he had told the truth.
Which bring us back to the crucial issue here. While King Abdullah is a trusted friend, Jordan has been best able to serve its own and America’s interests by staying out of wars.
Lest we forget, Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, refused to join the coalition of Desert Storm that drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.
In February 1991, President Bush charged that King Hussein seems “to have moved over, way over, into the Saddam Hussein camp.” In March of 1991, the Senate voted to end all military and economic aid to Jordan. But the king was looking out for his own survival, and rightly so.
Hence, is it wise for Jordan to become a front-line fighting state in a war, which, if it prevails, will mean a new lease on life for the Assad regime and a victory for Iran, the Shia militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah?
Critics argue that after making his commitment to “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State, President Obama has provided neither a war strategy nor the military resources to carry it out. And they are right.
But this is just another case of the president drawing a red line he should never have drawn. While U.S. air power can hold back the advance of ISIS and “degrade,” i.e., contain, ISIS, the destruction of ISIS is going to require scores of thousands of troops.
Though the Iraqi army, Shia militias and Kurds may be able to provide those troops to retake Mosul, neither the Turks nor any other Arab nation has volunteered the troops to defeat ISIS in Syria.
And if the Turks and Sunni Arabs are unwilling to put boots on the ground in Syria, why should we? Why should America, half a world away, have to provide those troops rather than nations that are more immediately threatened and have armies near at hand?
Why is defeating 30,000 ISIS jihadists our job, and not theirs?
With this outrage, ISIS has thrown down the gauntlet to the Sunni Arabs. The new Saudi king calls the burning of Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh an “odious crime” that is “inhuman and contrary to Islam.” The UAE foreign minister calls it a “brutal escalation by the terrorist group.”
Let us see if action follows outrage.
帕特里克·J·布坎南(Patrick J. Buchanan)是新书《最伟大的复出:理查德·尼克松如何从失败中崛起,创造新的多数派》的作者。
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In an ideal world God would just come down from the heavens and wipe every member of ISIS off the face of the earth, but God does not exist so mortal Beings have to kill ISIS.
Where the UAE is concerned, forget boots on the ground: they stopped even air attacks in December, after the Jordanian pilot was taken by ISIS. They want the US to “improve its search-and-rescue efforts, including the use of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in northern Iraq, closer to the battleground, instead of basing the missions in Kuwait”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/04/uae-united-arab-emirates-isis-air-attacks-pilot
完全OT-我发现很难专注于布坎南的专栏,因为他几乎把每个句子都放在自己的段落中。这就像阅读一个列表。
Buchanan is by far the best writer out there. The fact that he puts spaces between his sentences makes it much easier for people, like me, with vision problems, to read his columns. Trying to read through long paragraphs and keep the lines straight is very difficult. Besides that, ever single line of Buchanan’s columns deserves to be a paragraph unto itself. He never puts gobbledy-gook filler into his columns–only the facts and thought provoking questions stated in the fewest words possible.
Well our stupidity created ISIS. If you make it…..
Well stated. Jordan will be at risk. Most Arab soldiers are bad soldiers, willing to collapse flee. Relgious fanatics make good soldiers—better than good –determined. If Jordan’s soldiers don’t fight then isis will add to their new Arabia. Egypt & Saudi Arabia could be next.
It is all about the money! The Sunni royals, Saudi and Emirates, are the ones that have financed Sunni ISIS. They want an all Sunni state controlled by them and their money. They and Israel want to install another friendly political puppet dictator in a new Sunni state, just like Sissi in Egypt.
The tie between the Sunni royals and Israel is the Western dollar banking system controlled by Zionist oligarch bankers. Sunni royal oil and money are a very significant part of the Western money system. Saddam was a rebel – he threatened the Western oil/dollar regime, therefore he had to go.
Now Russia and Iran are threatening to do what Saddam did – decouple oil from the Western Zionist oil/banking system. That is why we have low oil prices today – and that is why Obama rushed to Saudi’s side when its king died.
There is going to be a new all Sunni state of Syria – the only question is “who is going to do the dying to get it.”
Let us hope that Obama has the fortitude to keep us out of it.
So, these two nations have come out against napalm and white phosphorus? Burning a man to death is burning a man to death. Doesn’t really matter if you do it from 3 feet or 30,000.
I’m sorry about your attention span problem.
but, you are right, it’s completely OT.
If we can step out of the way, the sunni-shiite arab-caucasian government-guerilla factions will fight to the death.