Jordan and Saudi Arabia are talking tough in the immediate aftermath of an Islamic State (ISIS) video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive, but their actions will wane, says former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin.
Jordan responded quickly by executing two ISIS members it has convicted and sentenced to death, including a woman whose vest failed to explode during a suicide attack in Jordan on 2005.
Jordan’s King Abdullah also has vowed “relentless war” until his military “runs out of fuel and bullets,” Fox News reports.
But Babbin, appearing Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” said he has heard that tune before.
“What are the Arab nations prepared to do?” he said. “Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. These guys all ought to be devoting very substantial forces, very substantial air forces to going in and crushing Isis. But they’re not.”
Babbin, who served during the George W. Bush administration, called it “business as usual for the Arab world.”
“They just sit and look at these things and they say, well, we’ll get … America to come do it for us or we won’t do it at all,” he said. “The Jordanians are talking very tough and very big right now. I think that they’re probably not going to have a lot of staying power.”
But the war really belongs to the Arab nations, Babbin told Cavuto.
“It’s an Arab war. They should be fighting it, not us,” he said.
At the same time, he said, President Barack Obama will not change policy to make the war winnable. “So we’re going to continue to give up to the ideological war that they’re busy surrendering,” he said.
Moderate Arabs must condemn what is done in their name, as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Abdullah have done, and the White House must admit the war is against radical Islam, Babbin said.
“We’ll see what the Jordanians do, but I think it’s going to be a flash in the pan, as it usually is,” Babbin said. “And these guys, well, they have to face the fact that it’s their war and Obama is not going to help them.”
