Lion of Jordan (87 page)

Behind the decision to abandon the rebels to Saddam's mercies lay the pessimistic view that Iraq was unsuitable for democracy and that the formula of Sunni minority rule through military force was the only way to keep the country in one piece. Saddam was free to use whatever equipment he had salvaged from the defeat, including helicopters, to suppress the uprisings. The Shi'ites were crushed and fled to the marshes. The Kurds were crushed and fled to the mountains. The suppression of the uprisings quickly punctured the euphoria of victory. In calling for Saddam's overthrow, Bush evidently had in mind a military coup, reshuffling Sunni gangsters in Baghdad rather than helping the opposition to create a freer and more liberal political order. By holding back, Bush ended up by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He himself proudly proclaimed that the victory against the aggressor in the Gulf laid the foundations for a New World Order, but the new order was more rhetoric than reality.

The period between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the end of the Gulf War was one of the most stressful and unhappy in Hussein's entire reign. Despite all the defeats and disappointments he suffered, Hussein remained an irrepressible peacemaker. From the first day he volunteered his services as a mediator and persisted in his efforts to find a peaceful solution to the problem until the outbreak of hostilities. He made trips to about twenty countries, including three to Baghdad, in an effort to avert a military confrontation, but all to no avail. The American version claims that an Arab solution to the crisis was not possible because Saddam could not be ejected out of Kuwait without the resort to military force. The Jordanian version claims that Hussein persuaded Saddam to begin to withdraw and attend a mini-summit, but that American–Arab condemnation and intimidation pushed him into a corner. According to this version, Hussein, with the approval of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and America, secured the beginning of an Arab solution, but these countries changed their minds and scuttled his efforts.

What went on in Saddam's dark and devious mind we shall probably never know. What is fairly clear, however, is that Hussein's allies promised him forty-eight hours to work out an Arab solution but that they did not keep their promise. Not only did they renege just as Hussein was on his way to Baghdad, but they vilified him, accused him of secretly supporting the invasion – which he had not – and attributed to him sinister designs against Saudi Arabia, which were not supported by a
scintilla of evidence. Consequently, Hussein felt used and abused by the Americans. Although he hesitated to say it publicly, he suspected that Bush double-crossed him and that he deliberately killed off his attempt at mediation because, under the influence of Thatcher, he came to equate negotiations with appeasement. With remarkable rapidity it became clear that Bush would settle for nothing less than Saddam's head. Unfortunately, in the end he did settle for less and at a horrendous cost to the Iraqi people.

With so many enemies on all sides, Hussein's success in preserving his throne and in keeping Jordan out of the Gulf War is all the more remarkable. The general consensus in the American media was that he had irreparably blotted his record and that he was unlikely to survive. In the event he did survive, albeit with difficulty. It took, however, all his skills as a tightrope walker to do so. On the eve of war he scored his most significant success by persuading Shamir to respect Jordan's neutrality. It is the supreme irony that in a crisis in which the survival of the Hashemite dynasty was at stake, Hussein's only true ally was Israel and his only reliable partner was Shamir, the leader of the party that stood for overthrowing the monarchy and turning Jordan into an alternative homeland for the Palestinians.

The Gulf crisis was very taxing emotionally and psychologically for the lonely, 55-year-old monarch, and it also affected his health. There was a series of minor incidents of ill-health; one, involving cardiac fibrillation, required a few days in hospital until his heart reverted to its normal rhythm. The following year Hussein had his first brush with cancer. Despite the new and more constructive challenges of the post-war era, his mood did not improve. His wife was worried because ‘he seemed to be retreating more and more into his own world, as if he were trying to disengage from anything that reminded him of the agonies of the Gulf crisis. Uncharacteristically, he began to avoid dealing with complicated problems. He kept saying he was just too tired, even when it came to resolving parenting issues. He did not shirk his responsibilities, but he became somewhat detached from what was happening at work and at home – a highly unusual development for a man who customarily involved himself 150 per cent in everything he did.'
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Jordan emerged from the Gulf war internally united but politically isolated and economically devastated. A UN-sponsored report estimated that the overall cost of the crisis to Jordan, including the implementation of UN sanctions, reached $1.5 billion in 1990, climbing to $3.6 billion in 1991. The true magnitude of the loss can be appreciated only by noting that Jordan's total GDP in 1990 stood at $4.2 billion and $4.7 billion in 1991.
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On top of all its other problems, Jordan had to cope with 300,000 Palestinian–Jordanian refugees and other Arabs without citizenship who had been expelled from Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion. Crown Prince Hassan continued to provide energetic leadership in dealing with the financial and humanitarian consequences of the crisis, but the problem was as much political as it was economic. The challenge was how to get Jordan out of the political mire so that the
flow of external aid could be resumed. Hussein went about meeting this challenge by rehabilitating Jordan in the eyes of America, by supporting the US-sponsored Arab–Israeli peace process and by building on the strategic understanding he had reached with Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir on the eve of the Gulf War. Shamir turned out to be surprisingly supportive of the king's efforts to repair his relations with the Americans, but he was none the less a reluctant participant in the peace process.

The first order of business was to overcome the crisis in Jordanian–American relations. The end of the cold war in 1990–91 and victory in the Gulf War gave the Bush administration the impetus to re-engage in the Arab–Israeli peace process. The key figure in this enterprise was Secretary of State James Baker. Baker was a blunt and straightforward Texan lawyer who had the rare merit among American politicians of being as tough with the Israelis as he was with the Arabs. Baker's ambitious aim was to get the parties to the conference table in order to deal with all aspects of the Arab–Israeli conflict. After the guns fell silent he made several trips to the region, and in the first two deliberately avoided Jordan to show his displeasure with its recent conduct. His first meeting with Foreign Minister Taher al-Masri took place in Geneva, not in Amman. But on his third trip, in April 1991, Baker did pay a visit to Hussein in the relaxed surroundings of the summer palace in Aqaba.

George Bush was still so angry with Hussein that he refused several requests for a meeting. Baker was just as upset, but they understood that there would be no peace process without Jordan's active participation. Jordan was crucial in persuading the Palestinians to come to the conference table. Like Jordan, the PLO was in disfavour because of its support for Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait. Baker was determined to exclude the PLO but to allow moderate individuals from the occupied territories to represent the Palestinians at the conference. The endgame he had in mind was a Palestinian entity that possessed more than autonomy but less than statehood. From his point of view the ideal solution was a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, but for this he needed Jordan's cooperation. He also had considerable leverage to exert: ‘Simply stated, the King was broke and he needed America's help to persuade his longtime benefactors in Riyadh to bail him out. There was every practical reason to believe that the King would be willing to do almost anything to end his political isolation and to reclaim the good graces of the United States.' At their meeting Baker told the king that
they were willing to move step by step to let bygones be bygones but only if Jordan enlisted actively in the US peace initiative. He wanted the king to know that it was going to be ‘a tough row to hoe to repair Jordan's relationship with the United States'. Baker also told the king that despite their differences, ‘We'll do what we can to help you patch things up with the Saudis.' During lunch the king gave a long rationalization of his behaviour during the war, which Baker considered wholly unconvincing.
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Nevertheless, Baker found the meeting encouraging because the king understood a simple dynamic: for America to help him he needed to play on America's terms. The Jordanian preference was for a UN-sponsored international conference with an ongoing role, aimed at tackling the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue simultaneously, and on the basis of resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of ‘land for peace'. Baker proposed a superpower-sponsored international conference followed by a twin-track approach in the form of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Arab states, and Israel and the Palestinians. Hussein expressed scepticism, fearing that the Palestinian issue, the core of the conflict, would be lost and that the whole process would be liable to break down.
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But in fairly short order Hussein endorsed the American proposal and declared that Jordan would attend the conference even if Syria did not. He also agreed to Shamir's idea of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and settled for Baker's compromise of UN observer status.
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Palestinian representation at the conference was a key issue. Hussein preferred separate Jordanian and Palestinian delegations each with its own separate agenda. The idea of a joint delegation had surfaced in his abortive peace partnership with Arafat in 1985/6 but it was overtaken by Jordan's disengagement from the West Bank and by the subsequent process of democratization on the East Bank. At their next meeting, on 14 May, Hussein told Baker he was willing to put together a joint delegation but only if the Palestinians asked him to do so. As a sweetener to encourage his continued cooperation, Baker told the king that, despite congressional objections, the administration would shortly deliver $27 million in food assistance to Jordan.
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Why did Hussein agree to play on America's terms? Quite simply, because he believed Baker when he said that the peace bus would come only once and anyone who did not get on would be left standing on the kerb. Hussein had been waiting for the peace bus since 1967, and he
was determined not to miss it. He also agreed to provide an ‘umbrella' for Palestinian participation in the peace conference – not as a favour to the Americans or the Palestinians but because it was in Jordan's interest. ‘I thought', he recalled, ‘that a process was about to start that was irreversible, and that we had to go. The Palestinians had to go and speak for themselves, and we had to provide them with the umbrella they needed. And that's what we did.'
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It was Shamir who continued to quibble over the fare, the driver, the rights of other passengers, and the bus's speed, route and destination.

Shamir, thought the American secretary of state, looked as if he had bitten into a sour persimmon. There was one and only one Arab leader who enjoyed Shamir's trust and that was the ruler of Jordan. Shamir carried his support for Hussein to the point of confrontation with the Bush administration. He insisted that the administration should do everything possible to keep the king in power despite his support for Saddam during the war. A stable Jordan, said Shamir, was crucial to the long-term prospects for peace. At one of Baker's frequent visits to Jerusalem, Shamir told him that he had met secretly with Hussein, that Hussein was critical to peace, and that some sort of confederation with Jordan at some distant point in the future was the likeliest solution to the problem of the West Bank.
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Shamir also used Israel's influence in both houses of Congress to moderate their punitive attitude towards the Jordanian monarch. Some Americans did not want to forget or forgive, but Israel and its friends in Washington gave them little choice. For Shamir this curious stand was a logical continuation of his meeting with Hussein in Ascot on the weekend of 4–5 January 1990. Shamir insisted in his talks with the Americans that Hussein's stand during the war was justified and that this was accepted by Israel.
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Dan Meridor, a Likud leader and a lawyer by profession, recalled a meeting with Baker and his team of peace processors shortly after the end of the Gulf War. Meridor urged them to visit the king and to rehabilitate him. The Americans reacted sharply by saying, ‘Who are you, the king's lawyer?'
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Inside Jordan, the king needed no advocates because his policy of democratization gained him widespread support from all parts of the political spectrum. But whereas the move towards democracy commanded general support, engagement in the peace process with the enemy did not. To give peace a chance Hussein replaced, in June 1991,
the conservative prime minister Mudar Badran with Taher al-Masri, the soft-spoken Jordanian of Palestinian extraction and liberal leanings. Badran and some of his ministers had indicated their unwillingness to negotiate with Israel. The appointment of a Palestinian to the top post was intended to foster a climate of trust and national unity. In his letter of appointment to Masri, the king emphasized Jordan's commitment to a negotiated settlement and support for international efforts to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict peacefully.
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But the Muslim Brotherhood persisted in their opposition to the peace policy of the king and tabled a motion of no-confidence in the new government in parliament. It also refused to participate in the National Congress that the king convened in order to rally popular support for his peace policy.