Responding to the Jordanian pilot brutally burned alive by ISIS fighters, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said that ISIS’s clear objective is to draw Jordan into a war, one which the Jordanians cannot win in his estimation.
The conservative columnist added on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Tuesday that the only way Jordan could defeat ISIS is with coalition partners, specifically the U.S. and Turkey.
KRAUTHAMMER: There is a fourth possible objective, and I think it is ISIS’s objective: destabilize its neighbors. Jordan is a miracle in the region. It is most stable regime yet it’s the weakest. It has no oil and yet for the last 70 years it has had only three rulers but has had huge divisions internally. It’s got a lot of Muslim Brotherhood. It has some ISIS sympathizers. I think the objective here was to draw Jordan into a war where it was a peripheral player. And this highlights, I think, the danger. We all worship the shrine of multilateralism — broad coalitions, bring everybody in. As a way to restrict American action, Obama is involving the UAE, the Saudis and of course, the Jordanians.
And now we see the result — Jordan being drawn into a direct war with ISIS is not a good thing for us. Jordan will not defeat ISIS on its own and wouldn’t defeat ISIS even if it had some coalition partners. It is the United States, essentially, or Turkey perhaps the only partners. Here we are bringing in Jordan for symbolic reasons. Yet a real pilot is shot down in real time and then executed in this horrible way causing a reaction where the king of Jordan is on the spot. He had to do something intense, important, punishing and that will draw him. He’s got refugees from Palestine and of course Syria, Iraq. He has a lot of internal dissent, which we have seen over the years. This is a way to stir the cauldron in a country that is stable, was stable, but is easily destabilized. And that’s what ISIS is after.