Lion of Jordan (86 page)

Shamir was sympathetic to Jordan's predicament. He understood that Jordan's geopolitical situation ruled out participation in the coalition against Iraq because Iraq could hurt Jordan. Hussein's success in keeping his country out of the October War of 1973 was an encouraging precedent in this respect. According to Shamir, Hussein began with a survey of his difficulties: the Americans had abandoned him; the Saudis were hostile to him; and he was isolated in the Arab world. At home the Palestinians were liable to cause riots if he publicly dissociated himself from the actions taken by Saddam. He did not want war: he feared its destabilizing effects, and his sole desire was that Jordan should not be turned into a battleground between Israel and Iraq. He asked for an Israeli promise not to infringe the territorial integrity of Jordan by land or by air, and he hoped that this would help him to procure a similar promise from Iraq.
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Hussein's account of the meeting suggests that it was Shamir who sought assurances that Jordan would not attack Israel:

Shamir said, ‘Look, I have a dilemma. In October 1973 our people were not vigilant enough and the Arab attack took place and caused us a lot of damage. Now you have your troops mobilized and my generals are calling for me to do the same and to have our troops facing yours. There isn't much distance in the Jordan Valley and it would be totally irresponsible, they say, if I did not take the same measures.' So I said, ‘Prime Minister, you are perfectly within your rights to take the same measures if you feel like it, but let me suggest that if that happens then the possibility of an accidental war developing between us is very real.' He said, ‘Well, what is your position?' I said, ‘My position is purely defensive.' He said, ‘Do I have your word?' I said, ‘Yes, you have my word.' He said, ‘That is good enough for me and I will prevent our people from moving anywhere.' And he did. And that was one of the events I will always remember. He recognized that my word was good enough and this is the way people should deal with each other.
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Ehud Barak was still troubled by the concentration of troops on Israel's border. Shaker, who was a man of few words, intervened in the discussion to allay his anxieties. This was Shaker's first meeting with Barak, and he found that he rather liked him. He was the military expert, having spent thirty-five years in the army, and Hussein's right-hand man. He amplified Hussein's position and went into detail. He and Hussein were extremely close. They had discussed and prepared the meeting beforehand, and were always in total agreement. Shaker had no reservations about meeting Israelis. He conducted himself at this meeting in a professional manner and spoke to Barak as one soldier to another. He said to Barak: ‘Your reconnaissance planes are flying all the time. We are professional soldiers. You know the difference between defensive and offensive postures.'
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Barak kept demanding more assurances until Shamir lost his patience. ‘King Hussein has given me his word,' he said firmly, ‘and that is enough for me.'
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With a gesture of his hand, the diminutive and taciturn man ordered the most highly decorated soldier in Israel's army to shut up and to take away the maps and the rest of the paraphernalia used to make his presentation.

The issue of the potential threat that Jordan posed to Israel was settled in the end to everybody's satisfaction. The king solemnly undertook to prevent the military use of his country in any shape or form against Israel. A second issue was more difficult to resolve. Jordan could not prevent the use of its air space by Iraqi ballistic missiles bound for Israel. Israel therefore sought Jordan's tacit acquiescence in the limited use of its air space should it be forced to retaliate against an Iraqi missile attack. The request implied that if Jordan's Air Force and its anti-aircraft systems engaged the IAF, Israel would be obliged to destroy Jordan's capabilities, which could lead to an Israeli–Jordanian war. But Hussein resolutely refused to accede to the request of the Israeli prime minister. He explained at length that he could not afford to be seen to collude with Israel, if the latter felt obliged to attack Iraq. He stated unambiguously that if Israel violated Jordan's airspace, he would give the order to protect his country's sovereignty. The two leaders parted amicably but without reaching agreement on this life-and-death issue.
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An issue that was not raised because it did not directly concern Jordan was Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Israelis knew, and the Americans confirmed, that Iraq had ballistic missiles that could be fitted with chemical warheads.
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For a nation haunted by the memories
of the Nazi gas chambers, this was a highly sensitive issue. Shamir's mother and sister had been taken away in carts from their village in Poland to Treblinka, where they perished at the hands of the Nazis long after he had settled in Palestine. He rarely talked about the Holocaust but it taught him an unforgettable object lesson and instilled in him, as in so many other survivors, a feeling of ‘Never Again!' In his public statements Shamir warned that if Iraq attacked Israel, terrible retribution would follow. This was taken by commentators to mean that an Iraqi attack on Israel with chemical weapons could provoke an Israeli nuclear response. Shamir did nothing to contradict this interpretation of his statements. In the course of the weekend the Israelis told their hosts that an Iraqi attack with chemical or biological weapons would set off instant retaliation.

In the intimate atmosphere of an English country house, Barak was the most forthright. ‘We have been gassed once,' he said to Shukri, ‘and we are not going to be gassed again. If one single chemical warhead falls on Israel, we'll hit them with everything we have got. If unconventional weapons are used against us, look at your watch and 40 minutes later an Iraqi city will be reduced to ashes.' ‘Could it be Baghdad?' asked the stunned Jordanian. ‘It could be,' was the reply. The Jordanians passed on the warning to Baghdad. Several years after the war, Shukri found out that the Israeli warnings indeed had the desired deterrent effect. Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who had defected to Jordan, confirmed that during the Gulf War the Iraqi Army had missiles armed with chemical warheads ready to be fired on Israel but the order from the president never came.
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The meeting succeeded beyond all expectations. A relationship of mutual trust was established between the two leaders. A strategic understanding was reached that Jordan would remain neutral when the bombs in the Gulf started falling and that Israel would respect its neutrality. This understanding goes a long way towards explaining the uncharacteristic restraint that Israel exercised during the Gulf War but also Jordan's success in avoiding being sucked into this war. ‘It was odd', Hussein observed, ‘that two countries at war over so many years should have had that degree of understanding to avoid war.'
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Hussein gave most of the credit for this achievement to his opponent. Looking back, Hussein described this meeting to a Likud minister as a turning point and said how impressed he had been with Shamir on this occasion.
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To his son
Abdullah, Hussein said that it was a very good meeting, that Shamir treated his word as trustworthy, and that they agreed, in soldiers' language, that ‘We won't go for you, if you don't go for us.'
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Shaker also paid tribute to Shamir, describing him as ‘the most polite and pleasant of the Israelis' and adding that ‘On that occasion he was a perfect gentleman.'
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Although he did not claim it, Hussein too deserved a share of the credit for the amazing success of the meeting. On this occasion, as at every other meeting with the Israelis, Hussein was as tactful as the most polished diplomat. Respect for the Jews, the People of the Book, was a Hashemite family tradition that Hussein had learned from his grandfather and passed on to his son. In addition to good manners, Hussein had deep insight into the sources of the insecurity that many Israelis feel despite their patent military superiority over all the Arab states. His close aides and family were well aware of the importance he attached to sensitive handling of the Israelis. He educated the people around him about the need to show understanding and sympathy to the other side. His key point, in the words of his son Abdullah, was: ‘If you deal with an opponent, and at that point the Israelis were opponents, you have to put yourself in their shoes… You have to see their concerns, their paranoia and their fears.'
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The understanding reached at the summit remained a closely guarded secret. The possibility of a clash with Jordan excited some reckless talk in Jerusalem. Some politicians on the extreme right did not share in the sudden conversion of their normally hardline leader to the royalist cause. Ariel Sharon was not impressed with the argument that Israel had to do its utmost to stop Jordan getting embroiled in the Gulf conflict. On the contrary, one of his motives for advocating swift and forceful military action against Iraq was his persistent desire to destabilize the regime in Amman. The cabinet continued to receive intelligence briefings on the situation in Jordan, but, following the expiry of the ultimatum for Iraqi withdrawal, it redirected its attention to developments further east.
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Operation Desert Storm was launched on 16 January and lasted forty-three days. The air war lasted thirty-nine days and the ground war four days, a hundred hours to be precise. Like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it was achieved with virtually no resistance at all. So great was the disparity in the firepower and competence of the two sides that the encounter between them could hardly be called a war. America, under
a UN banner, led a coalition of some thirty countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. After the outbreak of hostilities, Saddam persisted in his efforts to mobilize Arab public opinion on his side by turning what started as an Arab–Arab dispute into a conflict between the Arab nationalists on the one hand and Western imperialism and Israel on the other. His use of Islamic imagery and his call for a jihad against the infidels appealed to Muslim fundamentalists throughout the region.

On the night of 18 January the first barrage of eight Iraqi Scud missiles landed in Tel Aviv and Haifa. After months of uncertainty and bluster, Saddam carried out his threat to attack the Jewish state, dramatically raising the stakes in the Gulf War. It was the first air attack on an Israeli city since 1948. Altogether thirty-nine missiles landed in Israel during the war, resulting in only one direct casualty. The material damage caused was limited, but the psychological impact of the attack was profound. Uncharacteristically, Israel took punches on the chin without retaliating. Two main considerations accounted for this passivity in the face of provocation. One was the understanding that Shamir had reached with Hussein to respect Jordan's neutrality and to refrain from actions that would destabilize it. The other was the strong pressure applied by the Bush administration on Shamir to keep out of the war so that the fragile coalition against Iraq could remain intact. As well as applying pressure, the administration supplied Israel with positive inducements in the shape of Patriot anti-missile defence systems.

Hussein managed to keep his country out of the Gulf War, despite all the external pressures to join the coalition and the internal pressures to wade in on the side of Iraq. Popular sympathy for the Iraqis was fuelled by scenes of the aerial bombardment of their cities and villages by the coalition forces. Another source of mounting anger was the bombing by coalition planes of vehicles carrying vital oil supplies to Jordan from Iraq and the loss of Jordanian lives. Hussein got out in front of his people in a fiery address to the nation he made on 6 February. It was the most overtly anti-Western speech of his entire political career. He bitterly denounced the US-led assault on Iraq as ‘ferocious' and ‘unjust', and claimed that the war was going well beyond its UN mandate to liberate Kuwait. Washington and its allies rejected Jordan's attempts to resolve the problem peacefully. Why?

Because the real purpose behind this destructive war, as proven by its scope, and as attested to by the declarations of the parties, is to destroy Iraq, and rearrange the area in a manner far more dangerous to our nation's present and future than the Sykes–Picot agreement. This arrangement would put the nation, its aspirations and its resources under direct foreign hegemony and would shred all ties between its parts, thus further weakening and fragmenting it.

Hussein reserved his harshest criticism for the Arab participants in the US-led coalition in the war against Iraq:

When Arab and Islamic lands are offered as bases for the allied armies from which to launch attacks to destroy Arab Muslim Iraq, when Arab money is financing this war with unprecedented generosity unknown to us and our Palestinian brothers, while we shoulder our national responsibilities; when this takes place, I say that any Arab or Muslim can realize the magnitude of this crime committed against his religion and his nation.
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Hussein's speech was a surprising escalation in the propaganda war against America and its Arab allies but it had no material effect on the course of the shooting war. On 28 February, when the coalition forces had overrun Kuwait and southern Iraq and the Iraqi Army was in full flight, Bush gave the order for a ceasefire. The mother of all battles threatened by Saddam had ended in a military catastrophe. But, while Operation Desert Storm was a triumph of advanced military technology against an army that lacked the will to fight, its political aftermath was much more problematic. The basic objectives of the operation were achieved: the Iraqi forces had been ejected from Kuwait and the government-in-exile was restored to its capital. But Saddam retained his hold on power in Baghdad. He had sown the wind; his army and people were left to reap the whirlwind. During the war Bush repeatedly stated that he would not allow the government of Saddam to survive and openly called on the Iraqi people to rise up against their leader. On 1 March, the day after the ceasefire, the Shi'ites rose up in the south, and a few days later the Kurds rose up in the north. If Bush was serious about toppling Saddam, now was his chance. But when the moment of truth arrived, Bush recoiled from pursuing his policy to its logical conclusion. His advisers told him that a Kurdish victory would lead to the dismemberment of Iraq and that their call for help should therefore go unanswered.