JORDAN FOLLOWS THROUGH – AT 10:18 A.M. ET:  I'm usually no great fan of Arab countries, but Jordan has certainly stepped up to the plate in the fight against ISIS.  At least King Abdullah walks the walk while our president talks the talk, or mumbles the talk, or whispers, or something.  From Reuters: 

Jordan's air force chief said on Sunday his country's jet fighters had conducted 56 bombing raids in three days against Islamic State militants in northeast Syria, targeting key bases and arms depots.

Jordan stepped up its bombing of the jihadist group on Thursday in response to the brutal killing by Islamic State of a captured Jordanian pilot, and continued until Saturday.

No new strikes were announced for Sunday.

"We achieved what we aimed for. We destroyed logistics centers, arms depots and targeted hideouts of their fighters," General Mansour al-Jbour, head of the Jordanian airforce, told a news conference.

Jordan has carried out nearly a fifth of the sorties of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Syria to date, Jbour said. US aircraft joined the mission to provide intelligence, surveillance, a U.S. official told Reuters earlier on Sunday.

The raids had "degraded" nearly 20 percent of the militants' capabilities, he said.

COMMENT:  Impossible to verify the claims, but one must be impressed by Jordan's determination.   We hope it continues.

Some people say that ISIS cannot be defeated militarily, it being an ideology.  That's nonsense.  It's the kind of "observation" we always get from the political left.  How many times have you heard leftists say, "There's no military solution"?  We heard it often during the Vietnam War.  Strange, but the enemy in Vietnam certainly found a military solution.  They called it victory.

Ideologies need foot soldiers to spread their ideology.  They need a structure, a mechanism.  Destroy that structure and you may not wipe out the ideology, but you will certainly render it largely helpless.  We did not destroy fascism by defeating Nazi Germany, but Nazism as a force was torn to shreds.

February 8,  2015