This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 4th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A new Islamic military alliance is aimed at defeating ISIS in the backyard of Saudi Arabia,

but the alliance has a few clear problems.

It may not be as dedicated to its task as initially claimed, and it may be in part driven

by the improved diplomatic position of Iran.

Emma Ashford, a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute,

discusses the alliance.

The Islamic Military Alliance is a group that was proposed by Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago and it's basically a coalition

of more than 30 Islamic countries that are dedicated to fighting terrorism.

This sounds really great.

Actually, we don't really know that much about the group yet.

We don't really know who's really involved.

A lot of the countries that the Saudis listed as being

involved had not really heard of the Alliance before the announcement. A lot of the

countries aren't necessarily Muslim.

A number of them are majority Christian, which is a little strange.

And we don't know whether it's a military alliance, some kind of Arab-NATO, some sort of diplomatic system and we also don't know what they mean by

terrorism so really we don't know that much at all about what this is just that it's

sort of an intriguing announcement. So presumably ISIS is front and center on the agenda of any group.

Whatever the group is aimed at, if it's, we're going to fight terrorism however we define that you one would think

that ISIS is right on the top of the list and the one group that they have said that they

...