On Tuesday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer reacted to the video released by ISIS earlier in the day showing the Jordanian pilot held captive being burned alive.
According to Krauthammer, the move by ISIS could be seen as a destabilizing act by ISIS against Jordan, who Krauthammer deemed to have a weak army.
“There is a fourth possible objective,” Krauthammer said. “And I think it is ISIS objective — destabilize its neighbors. Jordan is a miracle in the region. It is most stable regime and weakest. It has no oil and yet since for the last 70 years it has had only three rulers but has had huge divisions internally. It has 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, Saudis and of course, Jordanians.”
“And now we see the result — Jordan being drawn into a direct war with ISIS is not a good thing for us,” he continued. “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 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 caldron in a country that is stable, was stable but easily destabilized. And that’s what ISIS is after.”
Krauthammer went on to say the United States should commit unprecedented act of declaring war against ISIS.
“That is why I think we ought to revise and bring back the anachronism of actually declaring war,” Krauthammer added. “If we say only Iraq and Syria you are right. There is ISIS in other places. It is not allowed to go after ISIS. The idea I think is to declare war as we used to do 70 years ago and say ISIS, Islamic State and that means against a certain entity anywhere it is. And it gives you rights as a belligerent that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Why not do it that way and revive the constitutional way of doing it?”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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