Lion of Jordan (23 page)

The Suez War made a major change to the regional balance of power in the Middle East. America and Russia gradually replaced Britain and France as the dominant external players in the region. There were far-reaching consequences for Britain, for Jordan and for the relationship between the two. Suez marked the effective end of what Elizabeth Monroe called ‘Britain's moment in the Middle East'. Britain alienated the Arab world by its aggression against Egypt and its collusion with France and Israel. A wave of anti-British feelings swept through the Arab world from North Africa to the Gulf.

One British diplomat suggested that the effects of the fiasco on ruling circles in Jordan were not as adverse as they were elsewhere in the Arab world. ‘To Jordanian eyes,' he wrote, ‘Britain had often appeared in the past as a rather maddening nanny-figure in the Arab nursery. The Suez affair had proved that nanny was human after all and herself capable of the worst kind of naughtiness.'
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This assessment is amusing but unconvincing. The Jordanians took the Suez crisis much more seriously, and the damage to Britain's reputation there, both at the level of the political elite and at the level of the masses, was much deeper and more lasting than this flippant comment would suggest. One Arab history of Jordan in the twentieth century accurately describes the Suez War as one of the low points in its relations with Britain, comparable to the Palestine war. All Jordanians almost without exception, according to this history, regarded the tripartite aggression against Egypt as an aggression against themselves.
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There was an acute sense of betrayal at all levels of society, from the king downwards, and the political fallout from the war was impossible to contain. On 1 November parliament passed a resolution calling for the severance of diplomatic relations with France. Only the fear of bankruptcy deterred it from calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Britain too. On 20 November, however, parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the abrogation of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty and of an exchange of diplomatic representatives with Russia and China. The treaty was clearly doomed, but there was as yet no agreement on how to replace the subsidy it provided. Nabulsi wanted to delay the
termination of the treaty until Arab funding could be secured. Hussein, on the other hand, wished to avoid dependence on Arab allies and made a determined bid to secure American financial support for Jordan. His aim was not Arab unity against the West but the replacement of one external patron and protector by another.

The first, secret approach to the Americans was made not by the king himself but by his chief of staff. On 9 November, Abu Nuwar requested from the American military attacheé in Amman American economic and military aid to Jordan in ‘sufficient volume' to compensate for the imminent loss of British aid. If America put up the money and arms, Abu Nuwar said, communism would be prevented from dominating Jordan; he would dissolve parliament and take over the government: ‘I and the people of Jordan will follow US policies.' He reiterated that he was strongly anti-communist, but he had to have aid; and if he did not get it from the US, he would get it from the USSR.
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Ten days later Hussein made a personal appeal for aid to the American ambassador, Lester Mallory. Mallory reported that ‘The two young men are changeable and impressionable.' He was non-committal about aid and merely cautioned the ‘young men' about the dangers to Jordan of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
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The American attitude towards the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan up to this point had been one of benign neglect, seeing it as a British fiefdom, and in any case they were party to the widely held belief that King Hussein would not last on his throne for very long. He was therefore a potential liability rather than as an asset. A British diplomat recalled that the American assessment of Hussein during this period was ‘desperately negative'. Hussein had been written off to the point that possible replacements were being discussed.
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Foreign Secretary Lloyd had his own doubts about Jordan's prospects of survival. He told John Foster Dulles, the US secretary of state, in December that the UK felt that the treaty with Jordan was of no further use and that ‘our money spent there is wasted, except that it may keep out worse money.' Dulles asked, ‘What is the future of Jordan?' Lloyd replied, ‘I don't think it's got one.' He then added, ‘Unless it becomes a little Satellite.' He said he thought the king would go mad. Dulles was not especially alarmed at the prospect of Jordan becoming a Soviet satellite. He said that a non-contiguous satellite could be ‘pinched off' by the US and the UK working together.
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Worse was to follow later in
the month. The British ambassador reported that, in Dulles's view, ‘the brutal fact was that Jordan had no justification as a state. This of course did not mean that now is the time to liquidate it.'
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Dulles could view the Middle East only through a cold war prism, and, consequently, he preferred to spend America's money on a country that might make a difference.

The British for their part were not only ready but eager to renegotiate their treaty with Jordan, not least because of budgetary constraints. After the dismissal of Glubb, the election of Nabulsi and the Suez débâcle, the subsidy had become a costly white elephant. The dilemma for the British was how to cut their losses without undermining the Hashemite state that they themselves had created in the aftermath of the First World War. The answer was to offer their ward up for adoption, and the most desirable candidate for parenthood was the United States of America. By a happy coincidence this was also the adoptive parent that Hussein had chosen for himself. Britain's and Hussein's efforts thus converged, without any coordination in trying to persuade the US to assume the burden that Britain was about to shed. On 17 January 1957 the British ambassador spoke to Dulles and left him an
aide-mémoire
saying that Her Majesty's Government could not afford to continue indefinitely to give Jordan about £13 million a year and that it hoped the United States would be prepared to take over this commitment. The ambassador wished to point out that this was not a question of pulling a British chestnut out of the fire because no British chestnut was involved. Rather it was a matter for concern to the whole Western alliance that the Soviet Union might move into Jordan. Dulles immediately ruled out military assistance to Jordan, but he left open the possibility of economic assistance.
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For Hussein, time was running out. Washington's rejection of his urgent plea for aid in December came as a great disappointment. It left him no option but to go along with Nabulsi's efforts to find an Arab replacement for the British subsidy. Hussein went as the head of a ministerial delegation to Cairo, and, on 19 January, he signed an Arab solidarity agreement. Under its terms, Jordan was to receive £12.5 million per annum for ten years. Saudi Arabia and Egypt pledged £5 million per annum each, while Syria promised £2.5 million. The principal Jordanian protagonist of this agreement was Abdullah Rimawi, the Ba'thi minister of state for foreign affairs. Hussein expressed his deep
gratitude to his three new patrons in public, but he was assailed by serious private doubts about their reliability. Britain reacted to the conclusion of the Arab solidarity agreement by requesting negotiations as soon as possible for termination of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty.

This was one of the low points of King Hussein's reign. For the first time since 1921, Jordan was to have no defence pact with a Western power. All the main pillars of strength of the Hashemite monarchy seemed to be crumbling – a Great Power guarantee, a united army and a loyal government. External threats compounded the problem. According to one Israeli source, British and American officials were talking frankly to the press about Jordan's vulnerability and lack of legitimacy in a manner that seemed calculated to prepare the ground for change. Against this background, the prospective visits of the Iraqi regent and of the Saudi monarch assumed particular significance because they represented the traditional contenders in the struggle for Jordan. The Israeli analyst considered it a real possibility that Jordan would be divided between Iraq and Saudi Arabia with the support of Britain and America.
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The atmosphere of crisis was vividly captured by James Morris:

In the course of time King Hussein, now advancing into a stringy manhood, began to realize how unwelcome and how unfriendly were the jinns he had conjured… There were, of course, good arguments for the extinction of his monarchy and the absorption of Jordan in a wider Arab community: the State was unviable, the monarchy no longer commanded the loyalty of the majority, kings were out of date any way. Hashemite antecedents had lost their allure. Even the English, with their attachment to the regal and the nomadic, had lost interest in Jordan, and did not much care whether she sank, swam or blew the bubbles of desire. The Middle East surged with a yearning for unity and power, and to every Arab nationalist the useless little Jordanian monarchy seemed an irritating anachronism. The West, thwarted and divided by the Suez débâcle, was at the nadir of its prestige. Colonel Nasser, supported by the Russians, was rampant.
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The odds against the survival of the monarchy may have looked overwhelming but Hussein was not about to throw everything away. He was sustained by a firm belief in the manifest destiny of the Hashemite family that his grandfather had instilled in him. Nor did he stand alone in defence of the Hashemite regime. He received strong support and
encouragement from his mother and uncle in what increasingly looked like a collective struggle for survival. Sharif Nasser persuaded his nephew to let him form a special Royal Guard contingent to safeguard the royal family.

Queen Zain, who had always seen the British as the protectors of the monarchy, worked behind the scenes to repair the damage of the Suez War. She extended a warm welcome to Charles Johnston, the new British ambassador, who found it extraordinarily difficult to establish any sort of close relationship with her son in the aftermath of Suez. In his memoirs, Johnston described Zain as a woman of charm, courage and considerable wit: ‘Listening to Her Majesty explaining the situation to me as she saw it, in her extremely outspoken and elegant Ottoman French, I had the impression all of a sudden that Britain and the West were not entirely friendless in the area.'
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Zain also played an important part in bringing about a rapprochement in Jordanian–Saudi relations, one based on a common recognition of the threat that fiery Arab nationalism posed to the conservative monarchies in the region. She prepared the ground for a meeting between her son and King Saud in Medina in mid January, at which the latter gave assurances of continuing financial support to the beleaguered monarchy. King Saud also offered to help Hussein in his efforts to rid his country of the influence of the Egyptian–communist agents.
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Hussein could now begin ‘the slow process of piecing together the fragments of his regime'.
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One factor that worked in favour of the palace was the division within the ranks of the government. The more radical among the ministers wanted to abolish the monarchy and turn Jordan into a republic, while the more moderate among them simply set their sights on moving Jordan closer to the radical Arab states and the Soviet Union. Nabulsi himself was all things to all men. He wasan opportunist rather than an extremist, a demagogue rather than an ideologue. But he was not strong enough to control the different factions within his cabinet or to give a consistent lead. He favoured political union with the radical Arab states in the long term, but his more immediate goal was to transform Jordan into a constitutional monarchy. ‘To this day,' one observer has written, ‘the legacy of al-Nabulsi and the government he headed remains a symbol for both the best and the worst of Jordanian political life. To some, al-Nabulsi represents the promise of constitutional democracy and the rule of law; to others, al-Nabulsi is held up as the man who pandered
to the jungle politics of the “Street” and nearly presided over the very dismemberment of the kingdom. There are, in fact, elements of truth in both characterizations, for al-Nabulsi was a complex and perhaps confused man.'
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Between January and April a series of clashes took place between Nabulsi and the king. The first was over the Eisenhower Doctrine, which was promulgated on 5 January and which aimed to fill the power vacuum created by the sharp decline of British and French influence. It offered American economic, political and military support to Middle Eastern states threatened by ‘International Communism'. The Eisenhower Doctrine was welcomed by the king but denounced by the Foreign Affairs Committee of parliament and categorically rejected by the prime minister. Other clashes were provoked by the permission Nabulsi granted for the publication of a communist newspaper and by his invitation to the Russian news agency TASS to open an office in Amman. Hussein picked up Nabulsi's alleged sympathy for communism as the defining issue in the struggle between them. On 2 February, Hussein wrote a letter to Nabulsi and immediately issued it to the press. In it he spoke with great passion and intensity about his opposition to communism, warned against the dangers of communist infiltration and served notice of his determination to preserve Jordan's independence. The royal ‘we' rang loudly throughout the letter:

Imperialism, which is about to die in the Arab East, will be replaced by a new kind of imperialism. If we are enslaved by this, we shall never be able to escape or overthrow it. We perceive the danger of Communist infiltration within our Arab home as well as the danger of those who pretend to be Arab nationalists while they have nothing to do with Arabism. Our ranks must be free from corruption and intrigues. We will never allow our country to be the field for a cold war which may turn to a destructive hot war if the Arabs permit others to infiltrate their ranks. We firmly believe in the right of this country to live. Its foundations must be strong and built on the glories of the past and the hopes of the future. No gap must be left to allow the propaganda of Communism to ruin our country. These are our views which we convey to your Excellency as a citizen and as our Prime Minister.