Confrontation-adverse President Barack Obama, with warm feelings for Islam, took eight days and three tries to actually say he wanted to “destroy” ISIS
Obama and Arabs Find a Common Enemy--the Islamic State
Given all the mutations that the Middle East has gone through thanks to the emergence of al Qaeda during the resistance to the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan, watching what is occurring now with an even more fanatical group calling itself the Islamic State (ISIS) and proclaiming itself the new caliphate has proven even more lethal and more feared.
The closest thing to a caliphate has been the assertion of al Saud, the royal family that runs Saudi Arabia who has long claimed to be the protector of Islam’s two most holy sites, Mecca and Medina, and of the true form of its expression, the strict Wahhabi interpretation. Were it not for its oil, the royals would have had to live off the earnings from the hajj, the visit to Mecca that all Muslims are required to make at least once in their lifetime.
The Saudis, despite having at least 250 U.S. and British advanced fighter aircraft, have typically avoided engaging in combat; the type that will be required to destroy ISIS. Instead, it gave $100 million to the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Center, but the latest news is that al Qaeda linked Syrian rebels from the Nusra Front battled U.N. military peacekeepers encamped on the Golan Heights on August 30, forcing some to escape to Israel. The UN’s peacekeeping role and its ability to deter wars are hardly notable.
Oil made the Middle East’s despots and monarchs wealthy, but former despots have been removed in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, while Syria’s has been engaged in what started as a civil war and became a magnet for the group that broke away from al Qaeda, espousing an even more fanatical interpretation of Islam.
Now Middle Eastern nations that have been enemies, like Saudi Arabia and Iran—one Arab, the other Persian, one Sunni, the other Shiite—have found themselves equally threatened.
This common enemy has caused other relationships to alter. Turkey which has been in conflict with the Kurds remained silent when Syrian Kurdish militias helped rescue the Yazidis who were driven from their homes by ISIS. Al Qaeda’s Syrian component, the Nustra Front, now finds itself at war with ISIS.