Solidifying the caliphate

Now it's the Iraq-Jordan border that has been rendered null and void.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Iraq's prime minister in Baghdad on Monday to push for a more inclusive government, even as Baghdad's forces abandoned the border with Jordan, leaving the entire Western frontier outside government control.

Sunni tribes took the Turaibil border crossing, the only legal crossing point between Iraq and Jordan, after Iraqi security forces fled, Iraqi and Jordanian security sources said.

The tribes were negotiating to hand the post over to insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant who took control of two main crossings with Syria over the weekend.

Kurdish forces control a third border post with Syria in the north, leaving central government troops with no presence along the entire Western frontier which includes some of the most important east-west trade routes in the Middle East.

For the insurgents, capturing the frontier is a dramatic step towards the goal of erasing the modern border altogether and building a caliphate across swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Of course, there's been a lot of debate about whether our 300 special forces in an advisory capacity can be effective in any meaningful sense, or whether that's 300 too many.  From this blogger's perspective in the middle of North America, it looks like what we'd better do is prepare to address the new reality of an entirely new jihadist entity spanning what had been three "countries," as well as an Iran that has the same orientation it has had since 1979.  In short, we will see two entities, each of which has an intention to destroy the West, vie for dominance.  I know the temptation is to indulge the hope that they will so thoroughly decimate each other with their well-known tools of catastrophic terror that neither will be in a position to cause trouble in places beyond their own neighborhood.  But that is to forget how central obliterating the West is to the mission of each.  That accomplishment would go far to seal the dominance of the party so obliterating.  Each side is already plotting such attacks, after all.

I do think it's a little late to preoccupy ourselves with shoring up an al-Maliki-led coalition.