I’m a regular viewer of the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I like the show because in spite of being a comedy he often has cutting and accurate commentary on the news of the day. I had to disagree with his monologue tonight though. He went to great pains to criticize Saudi Arabia for not being supportive enough of the United States’ fight against ISIL. I think this is misguided.
While I understand Stewart’s aggravation with Saudi Arabia, as they seem to play every side, Saudi Arabia can’t do much more than the commitment they made to run training camps for Syrian rebels fighting ISIL. Although, I suppose they could punish Saudis who financially supported ISIL.
Beyond Saudi Arabia’s lack of support Stewart was ‘distressed’ by the fact everyone militarily supporting the American fight against ISIL are supposedly Christian states. This causes the fight against ISIL to look like a crusade. Yes, on second thought, that does look bad and is a radical Islamic propagandists dream.
The problem is, if you suck Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and other Gulf Arab states militarily into the conflict you risk sucking Iran into the conflict. I admit this is a distant possibility but it’s a real one.
If bringing Sunni Arab states into the mix is unlikely because they all hate Bashar al-Assad, Iran and Iraqi Shiite then what about Turkey? Surely, Turkey doesn’t want a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth types on their border? No, they probably don’t but ISIL could do an effective job of slaughtering the Kurds for them if they got strong enough.
I suppose what it boils down to is most surrounding states have powerful reasons to both support and destroy ISIL. Their strategy, much like Obama until yesterday, is to wait and see and be as ambivalent as possible.