Lion of Jordan (83 page)

On the morning of 4 August, King Fahd called Hussein and informed him of the American claims that Iraqi troops were advancing towards the border with Saudi Arabia. Hussein did not believe these claims but offered to check them with Saddam. Saddam was also surprised and, after conferring with his senior military staff, reported that their nearest forces were thirty to forty kilometres from the border, adding that he had just given his generals orders to keep a distance of at least fifty kilometres. Hussein relayed these assurances to King Fahd and suggested a bilateral meeting. Fahd clearly did not want a meeting and offered to send his foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, to Amman instead. Prince Saud arrived in Amman the following day with the news that the Americans had given King Fahd a photograph that allegedly showed Iraqi troops advancing. Hussein repeated the assurances that Saddam had given him and added that Iraq had officially notified the UN of its intention to withdraw from Kuwait. As a mark of his own confidence in Saddam's assurances, Hussein offered to send half his army to patrol the border area between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia so that his men would be the first to face any advancing Iraqi troops. The Saudis did not respond to the offer, not surprisingly given their suspicions, and the offer ran into the sand.
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What Hussein did not know was that, in view of the allegedly suspicious Iraqi troop movements towards the Saudi border, an offer to send American troops to defend Saudi Arabia had been communicated to Riyadh as early as 2 August, six days before the official announcement was made. On 5 August, Saddam both announced and made a modest start with the withdrawal of troops from Kuwait. This gesture, however, was dismissed by Mubarak as ‘only redeployment' and by Bush as ‘insubstantial'. The Bush administration spent the period 2–6 August
secretly negotiating with Saudi Arabia on the size and composition of the American forces to be dispatched. Initially, King Fahd was very reluctant to have American troops on his sacred soil, so a good deal of scaremongering and arm-twisting by the president and his aides were required to secure his consent. The first contingent arrived as early as 6 August. Mubarak was informed about these negotiations, and he too committed and dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia. This explains his abrupt change of course, his rejection out of hand of Saddam's proposals and the haste with which he moved to denounce Iraq. There was no way Mubarak and Fahd could attend a mini-summit with Saddam while American and Egyptian troops were arriving in Saudi Arabia to challenge him. Within less than two days, the two Iraqi conditions – no condemnation and no foreign troops – were breached, and the dialogue with Iraq was summarily suspended. Hussein's credibility as a mediator was destroyed and the possibility of an Arab solution was undermined by the very parties who had asked him to mediate in the first place. It is worth noting that UN Security Council Resolution 660 of 2 August was almost identical to the proposal that Saddam accepted, namely, withdrawal and negotiations. This is a critical part of the story that the American version of the Gulf crisis completely overlooks.
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Hussein's heart sank when he heard about the arrival of American forces in Saudi Arabia. The foreign intervention in the affairs of the region that he so much dreaded had now come about. Overnight an Arab–Arab dispute was transformed into a major international crisis pitting America and its allies against Iraq. Suddenly, Saddam had to ‘lose face', and conciliation was replaced by confrontation. Hussein's role as a mediator was over: he was outside the tent. Jordan was no longer a player in the issues that interested America. For the next six months America was absorbed in the logistics of deploying forces in the Gulf and in building up a broad military coalition against Iraq. On 6 August the Security Council imposed an embargo on Iraq. In response Saddam declared that his invasion of Kuwait was irreversible, and two days later Iraq announced the annexation of Kuwait in its entirety.

Until then it was generally assumed in the Arab capitals that Iraq intended to occupy Kuwait only for a short period. Saddam Hussein later explained the thinking behind the annexation to the king: ‘I realized that the Americans were determined to go to war.' He felt that if Kuwait was not part of Iraq, the Iraqi forces there would not be strongly
motivated to defend it. It was one thing to expect the Iraqi Army to defend Iraq unto death and another to ask them to die for the defence of Kuwait. If Kuwait was officially part of Iraq, it would make all the difference. ‘That's why I did it at the time.'
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But from the point of view of the international community, this was the point of no return: the brutal Iraqi dictator had snuffed out a sovereign nation-state and a member of the United Nations, and he could not be allowed to get away with it. Jordan, like the rest of the international community, refused to recognize Saddam's puppet regime in Kuwait.

Hussein felt let down by his Iraqi friend, and there was nothing he could do to retrieve the situation. American aid to Jordan was cut off. The Gulf countries that joined the military coalition cut off their aid as well. The imposition of sanctions against Iraq by Security Council Resolution 661 had disastrous economic consequences for Jordan. Another blow to the crippled Jordanian economy was the flood of destitute refugees from the Gulf. So anguished was Hussein that, on 8 August, he talked to his wife about abdication. Given the degree to which he was being personally targeted and maligned, he wondered whether Jordan might suffer less if he handed over his responsibilities to someone else. But a steady stream of messages and phone calls told him that the entire country was behind him. Queen Noor added her encouragement and support. There was no point in abdicating during the crisis, she told him. His people needed him now more than ever, as did others round the world who counted on his moderation to counterbalance the war fever that was sweeping the region.
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Hussein's popularity at home reached a zenith. The overwhelming majority of Jordanians, both in the country and in the army, sympathized with the Iraqi people. There was also a popular perception that, with the exception of Saddam, the rulers of the Gulf states were an indolent, greedy and venal lot who refused to share their fortuitous wealth with the poor and needy of the Arab world. America stood accused of upholding double standards, on the one hand condoning Israel's occupation of Arab lands and on the other hand condemning Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. Hussein's stand in the crisis boosted the legitimacy of the regime. For the first time in Jordanian history, the regime allowed and even encouraged the holding of anti-Western demonstrations in public places. The Muslim Brotherhood was given a fairly free hand to mobilize popular support for the king's policy of opposing Western military intervention
in the Gulf.
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The Gulf crisis was one of the few episodes in Jordan's history with almost complete convergence between the positions of the regime, the army, parliament and public opinion.

Hussein's popularity at home came at considerable cost to his relations with the West. The West was aware that Iraq and Jordan were allies and that this called for a more pragmatic foreign policy. Nevertheless, Western goodwill was severely strained by material Jordanian support for Saddam in evading UN sanctions and by what was seen as Hussein's failure of leadership in the early days of the crisis. It was felt that had the king thought more astutely, he would have realized that Jordan's real interest lay in joining with the rest of the international community against the lawbreaker. Hussein could have told his people that the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force was vital to Jordan and that Jordan's stand in the current crisis was anchored in this principle. Saddam therefore should not expect any moral or material support from Jordan. Hussein's lack of leadership at home, it was claimed, had the effect of increasing popular support for Iraq and of intensifying the animus against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Western experts knew that the position of Jordan's various Bedouin tribes varied according to their connections with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia but that generally they were not in favour of the implicit Jordanian support for Saddam. Hussein's behaviour was regarded by these experts as emotional and impulsive. He was making one mistake after another and inflicting serious damage on Jordan's relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The term ‘plucky little king' went out of fashion.
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Hussein became somewhat divorced from reality in seeing himself as the victim of cynical Western and Arab politicians who promoted their own selfish interests behind the cloak of international legality. But he was not the only saint in a world of sinners, as the official Jordanian version of the Gulf crisis would have us believe. Although the conspiracy theories that linked him to the invasion of Kuwait were not substantiated, he was strangely naive in what he thought he could achieve. This may have been a case when, once again, his strategic sense let him down. His younger brother certainly thought so. One of the very few flaming rows between the two brothers was on the subject of Saddam. Hassan warned Hussein repeatedly that Saddam was an incorrigible and dangerous despot, but Hussein would not listen. The material benefits of the
association with Saddam warped his judgement and blinded him to the dangers. Hussein was always hopeful of restoring Jordanian–Iraqi relations to their pre-1958 glory, hence his sympathy for Saddam. He thought that, through Saddam, Jordan might be able to retrieve the position it lost in Iraq as a result of the July 1958 revolution.
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In the course of one of their periodic rows on the subject, Hussein said to Hassan, ‘If you don't take this man seriously, I'm really beginning to question, to have my doubts about you.' ‘Fine,' retorted Hassan, ‘make your choice.' During the Gulf War, Hussein was angry and truculent and at times even seemed prepared to throw caution to the wind and to join in the battle alongside the Iraqi dictator. Hassan thought he detected the same suicidal tendency in his elder brother during the Gulf War that he had noticed before, notably in pushing for a second front against Israel in October 1956 and in taking the plunge, without thinking about the consequences, in June 1967.
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The truth of the matter is that Hussein was only a minor actor in this particular drama. His efforts to find a peaceful way out, sincere and persistent as they were, could not deflect the slide towards war. President Mubarak took the initiative in convening another emergency meeting of the Arab League in Cairo on 10 August. Attempts to revive mediation efforts were brushed aside. The text of a resolution that was probably a translation from English into Arabic was quickly pushed through. It repeated the previous condemnation of Iraq; it refused to recognize the annexation of Kuwait; and it responded affirmatively to the appeal of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states for Arab forces to help defend their territory against outside aggression. Jordan, Yemen and Algeria abstained because they saw the resolution as a cover for foreign inter-vention.
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Hussein sat with his hands on his cheeks in a cloud of gloom. ‘I felt right away, from the first instant, that this was going to be the most tragic summit in the history of the Arab nation,' he told the secretary-general.
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Two days later, on 12 August, Saddam, in what amounted to a rare political master-stroke, suggested that Iraq might withdraw from Kuwait if Israel withdrew from all occupied Arab territory and Syria withdrew from Lebanon. It was this proposal that introduced the concept of linkage into the Middle East diplomatic lexicon. Overnight Saddam became the hero of the Arab masses and the saviour of the Palestinians. The Gulf conflict and the Arab–Israeli conflict became linked in the
public mind. An Israeli government spokesman dismissed Saddam's proposal as a cheap propaganda ploy. But the proposal landed the Bush administration on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they did not want to reward Saddam for his aggression; on the other hand, they could hardly deny that the long-festering Arab–Israeli conflict also required a settlement. Bush's way round this dilemma was to deny that there was any parallel between the two occupations but to promise that once Iraq left Kuwait, a settlement of the Arab–Israeli problem would be high on his administration's agenda. In other words, he rejected the simultaneous linkage of the two conflicts in favour of a deferred linkage.

Baghdad's linkage proposal motivated Hussein to embark on a tour of Western capitals in a desperate attempt to scale down the crisis. On 13 August he flew to Baghdad for a meeting with Saddam, giving rise to speculation in the media that he came away carrying a message from Saddam. Hussein said there was no message but once again he put himself forward as an intermediary. He was the only Arab leader who was still talking to Saddam, and he hoped that the Americans would use him as a channel of communications to Baghdad. On his return, he called Bush and requested a meeting. Bush was in Kennebunkport, his summer resort in Maine, and the meeting was arranged for 16 August. A small royal party arrived by helicopter at the summer resort for what turned out to be a rather raw experience. Bush himself was courteous but truculent and dismissed out of hand the king's negotiations with Saddam for a peaceful withdrawal. Bush expected a message from Baghdad, but, if there was one, the king never mentioned it to him. Hussein appeared to be seeking to play a role as an intermediary but Bush saw nothing to negotiate. In his diary Bush recorded:

We talked very frankly about the differences. I kept trying to say that the friendship was intact… He [pressed] for some middle ground that could solve the problem, and I kept saying, there isn't any – it's got to be withdrawal and restoration of the Kuwaiti regime. There cannot be any middle ground, because tomorrow, it will be somebody else's aggression… Hussein refuses to admit that this is a madman. He talked about the ‘haves and the have-nots'…
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