MIDEAST - Arab World vs ISIS

"What role should Mideast countries play in Islamic State fight?" PBS NewsHour 9/18/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Joining me now to explore that is former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher.  He’s now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace and author of “The Second Arab Awakening and the Battle for Pluralism.”   Robin Wright is a journalist and author who has reported extensively on the Arab world and neighboring Iran.  She’s also a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center.  And Nader Hashemi is director for the Center for Mideast Studies at the University of Denver.

Marwan, I want to start with you.

This week, the Obama administration has been laying out the case to try and drum up support for the U.S. plan against the Islamic State.  How much support is there in Jordan, where you are?

MARWAN MUASHER, Former Foreign Minister, Jordan:  There’s a lot of support in Jordan against, you know, ISIS.  That doesn’t mean, of course, again boots on the ground in the case of the Jordanians, but it will mean a lot of intelligence support, a lot of logistical support, a lot of support that we have seen before, when Jordan cooperated with the Americans against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the predecessor of I.S. in Iraq in 2007.

So, you can expect much of that support again.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Nader Hashemi, what’s your take on the people and the leaders in the Middle East and how much they support the U.S. plan?

NADER HASHEMI, University of Denver:  Well, I think one always has the make that distinction between the people and the leaders of the Middle East, because what the people want is not always reflected in sort of official elite position.

I think there’s, you know, always the back drop of the legacy of external intervention, the legacy of colonialism, and more recently the legacy of the disaster of the Iraq war.  People, I think, are very feared of a repeat in — of that scenario playing itself out if this intervention goes badly wrong.

And there is also, I think, just the general sort of uncertainty and lack of clarity in terms of what Obama’s long-term strategy for the region is, because he seems to have been sending signals in recent years that he really wasn’t interested in investing any time and attention in the Middle East.  He wanted to pivot to Asia.  He wanted to reduce the American footprint, all for very good reasons.

And then his whole strategy with respect to the bloodletting and the disaster in Syria has raised a lot of questions just about where Obama stands, what his grand strategy is.  So, I think there’s a lot of sort of deep concern, both at the popular level and also at the governmental level, with respect to what comes next.