What are we to make of Jordan’s King Abdullah and his dedication to the fight against ISIS? He was in the President’s Cabinet room recently along with a group of lesser Arab lights, all as solemn as hired mourners at a Chinese funeral. Aside from President Obama, Abdullah was the only head of state in the room; other putative coalition members had chosen to send functionaries of various stripes. There isn’t much upside for any of them in the events of recent months, and still less in the response we are trying to coordinate. If history is any guide, they will root mostly from the bleachers, sign some checks, and keep anchors to windward. Abdullah has better reasons than they for concern; no one is closer to the center of ISIS’s crosshairs than he. So he might have chosen to remain in the shadows, or, even worse, he might have made the mistake his father made in 1990.
His father, King Hussein, played things very differently after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He knew that Saddam’s invasion was a disastrous mistake, but he also saw an opportunity to play peacemaker, the culmination of his life as the elder statesman of the Arab world. That required forging some illusory middle ground where none could exist. So he agreed to tough sanctions at the UN, but applied them fitfully at the border. He sent personal messages of friendship to the President, and followed them with public speeches denouncing imperialist exploiters of Arab resources. He offered a deal to Saddam without Washington’s knowledge, and only the Iraqi leader’s impenetrable stupidity saved the King—and the United States—from diplomatic disaster. In the end, he didn’t deter Saddam, and infuriated everyone else.
His son is still paying for that mistake, and has been careful not to repeat it. When we blundered into Iraq in 2003, Abdullah was quick to cast his lot. But he hadn’t paraded his allegiance in public, in large part because of his political vulnerabilities at home. Nasser invoked the first great Sunni Awakening in Jordan, and Saddam the second. Both shook the Hashemite throne. Now we have provoked and inadvertently armed a third great Sunni revolt, nothing like the one we imagined and far more relentless than any in the past. The Old King survived by accommodating the both Nasser and Saddam, and by downplaying—if never quite abandoning—his own pretensions to leadership of theAhl as-Sunnah. Abdullah, half English by birth and more than half American by disposition, has no such illusions about himself. But neither has he the power or prestige his father had when it came to calming his Sunni subjects. Anti-Western feeling runs very close to the surface in Jordan, and so now does admiration for the hard men in the desert who are giving the West such a fright.
In spite of this, King Abdullah has shown he is committed to the fight and has a vital piece to add. The Jordanian intelligence service is among the best in the area. Ours has been particularly inept in assessing the strength and intentions of this new movement, so it is reasonable to suppose what little we know about the doings of ISIS comes in large part from countries like Jordan with the assets and cultural affinity we lack. The King also exemplifies what we say we want: Arab leaders who are willing to take the lead with American backing rather than taking cover behind American forces. But even the Jordanian King may begin to waver unless we provide a convincing narrative about what comes next. So far, we haven’t done so.
There are geographic and cultural limits to have far ISIS can expand. When it ceases to feed on its surroundings, we can hope it begins feeding on itself. But what then? Who will rule in majority Sunni areas? The myth of a resurrected, multi-sectarian Iraq is useful for American domestic political purposes, but it will fool no one in the area. We destroyed that Iraq in 2003. The fantasy that we can train an effective Iraqi national army disappeared along with the discarded uniforms of our previous trainees. The old narrative is in shambles, and no new one has emerged, aside from a few, dispirited and transparently false clichés.
Abdullah won’t be unseated by conspiring ministers, or Palestinians shouting in the streets. The Jordanian Army is Sunni, but Bedouin first; as it has demonstrated many times, it will fight and fight effectively. But that doesn’t put Abdullah beyond the reach of ISIS. As he has been the first to join in the fight, so he will be the first victim if we show a lack of resolve.
Henry Kissinger has said so many things that some were bound to be right; one of things he said was that the compromise between lack of force and sufficient force is not insufficient force. In fact, it’s the worst option of all. It is a very good thing to have a cautious Commander-in-Chief, one who consults his reason rather than his viscera. When the great and good convened to decide on a reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba, everyone in the Cabinet room was a hawk, except for the man at the center, whose caution, we now know, saved us from nuclear disaster. Still, even prudence can be practiced to excess. An air campaign doesn’t communicate resolve but rather the lack of it. The inconvenient truth is that we will have to risk considerably more than that to convince even someone as well disposed as Abdullah that we mean what we say.