“Clientitis” is a common affliction among diplomats, the tendency to gradually conflate the interests of the country you represent with those of the country in which you serve. One symptom is a selective blindness to the country’s flaws, exacerbated by the seductive power of access and apparent influence. I tried hard to avoid that during my time in Jordan, but didn’t always succeed. I kept my lines open to critics of the Jordanian elite and my attention fixed on obvious problems of economic stagnation; corruption that was small-bore by regional standards, but nonetheless pervasive; political repression that was modest compared to the practice of most of Jordan’s neighbors, but nonetheless persistent; and institutional dominance by a Jordanian intelligence establishment that was a valuable regional partner for the United States and less thuggish than in most of the region, but nonetheless troublesome. I’m sure I occasionally sanded the edges of my judgments. A lot was at stake for the United States in the transition from Hussein to Abdullah, and in a region where imperfections were relative and successes rare, I had no doubt of the value of our support.
In one cable at the beginning of 2000, I wrote, “If you had asked most Jordanians a year ago, as King Hussein lay dying, how their country would fare without him, few would have predicted the impressive achievements in economic reform and regional diplomacy of King Abdullah, whom they barely knew.” I added, without hyperbole, that Abdullah “has done more to reform the structure of the Jordanian economy in the last six months than Jordan did in the entire previous decade.” I was also quick to point out that the hard part was coming. I stressed that “if he is going to turn the promise and the glitter of his first year into enduring success in Jordan, the King will have to begin to show tangible results for structural economic reforms, start a process of opening up a sclerotic political system, and lay the basis for long-term protection of Jordanian interests in a region on the verge of some profound changes.”11
The wider region remained a snakepit, despite the king’s skill in navigating it. More than a decade before the Arab Spring, the social and economic forces building beneath the surface of the region were intensifying. In an April 2000 cable, I argued that “globalization, technological change and the expanding reach of independent media will only increase the pressures on the anachronistic, authoritarian regimes who dominate the Arab world—even ones as relatively tolerant and civil as the Hashemites.”12 On the immediate horizon were adversaries in the neighborhood, and troubles waiting to erupt. Two of the most obvious were Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, badly wounded in the Gulf War but still a deeply complicated problem for Jordan, and the fragile relationship between Israelis and Palestinians on the other side of the Jordan River.
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EVER SINCE THE end of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991, the United States had been engaged in a frustrating effort to contain Saddam Hussein, protect the Kurds, and prevent Iraq from menacing its neighbors. The UN Security Council had authorized no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, which the United States policed at considerable expense. A UN inspection regime (UNSCOM) had been established to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that Saddam met his UNSC-mandated obligations to destroy any remaining infrastructure and stocks of weapons of mass destruction, as well as ballistic missiles with a range of more than ninety miles. Stringent economic sanctions remained in place to keep pressure on Saddam to comply.
Inevitably, this whole structure became increasingly difficult to manage. Early in President Clinton’s tenure, Saddam mounted an unsuccessful plot to assassinate former president Bush in Kuwait. Clinton retaliated with missile strikes against Iraq. As the years went by, Saddam episodically challenged U.S. aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones, and the United States responded. The Iraqis angered the Americans with their practice of “cheat and retreat” in dealing with UNSCOM—refusing access to sites for long periods, eventually offering limited concessions under pressure, and then repeating the whole maddening process. Saddam declared eight large compounds, containing more than a thousand buildings, to be presidential palaces, exempt from inspection. In December 1998, the United States launched Operation Desert Fox, a series of air and missile strikes against Iraqi targets, to punish Saddam for his intransigence.
Jordan was exposed on several fronts, leaving Abdullah with a nettlesome set of competing demands. It was heavily dependent on a concessional oil arrangement with Iraq, tacitly permitted by the United States and the UN Security Council, and increasingly squeezed as oil prices rose in the late 1990s. Iraq remained an important and irreplaceable market for cheap Jordanian goods, especially pharmaceuticals. Jordanian popular sympathies also remained strongly with the Iraqis, amplified by the human impact of sanctions and aggravated by broader antipathy toward American policy in the region.
King Abdullah had no illusions about Saddam. He continued the quiet practice of exchanging information about Iraq with the United States and supported our forces involved in the no-fly zones. But he couldn’t afford the economic or domestic political consequences of outright opposition to Saddam. The Gulf Arabs might have eased his calculus by substituting concessional oil for the Iraqi arrangement, but whether for reasons of lingering animus toward Jordan’s position in the Gulf War or inertia never followed through. Abdullah was in a bind.
His own encounters over the years with the Iraqi leadership had been dispiriting, and often bizarre. King Abdullah once told me about an especially strange encounter. Some years before, in the late 1980s, King Hussein sent Abdullah and his younger brother, Prince Faisal, to Baghdad to get acquainted with Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein. Uday, then still in his twenties, had not yet achieved the notoriety of his later years, when he regularly showed off the pet lions in his Baghdad palace, beat the members of the Iraqi national soccer team when they lost matches, and kidnapped and raped female Iraqi university students who caught his eye. Qusay was less visibly thuggish, but already developing a reputation as his father’s son when it came to cunning brutality.
On the second day of the visit, their hosts took Abdullah and Faisal for a boat ride on a large man-made lake outside Baghdad. Expecting a quiet afternoon, both were more than a little shocked when Uday—always the thrill seeker—pulled out an RPG and fired it just ahead of his own security patrol a few dozen yards away. No one was hurt, but Uday didn’t seem at all bothered by the prospect, acting as if this were just another way to spend an afternoon. Abdullah and Faisal were horrified. As Abdullah put it, “There are many people in my generation of leaders in the region with whom I already have a good rapport—but Uday is not one of them.”13
After Abdullah became king, he grew increasingly anxious about the direction of American policy toward Iraq. He was skeptical that the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton late in the autumn of 1998, represented anything more than wishful thinking. The ILA stated explicitly that it was the goal of the United States to change the regime in Baghdad, but Abdullah saw no compelling strategy behind the rhetoric—and a lot of risk for Jordan along the way. He thought many of those most prominent in the exiled Iraqi opposition movement were frauds, or at best naïve. He was particularly caustic about Ahmed Chalabi, who had been run out of Jordan a decade before as head of a prominent local bank, following allegations of embezzlement.
As he emphasized to me with mounting concern in 1999 and 2000, the king saw Western sanctions policy as self-defeating. Saddam had successfully manipulated the UN’s Oil for Food Program, aimed at easing the plight of ordinary Iraqis, to tighten his own grip on power. By late 2000, Abdullah told me that “it’s more likely that Saddam will be killed by a meteor than that sanctions will undermine him.”14
By the end of the Clinton administration, the king was arguing consistently that the United States was helping, not hurting, Saddam, allowing him to play the victim and exploit an increasingly tense regional situation. He maintained that
Washington should abandon economic or civilian sanctions, and instead intensify measures prohibiting the import of military or dual-use items. These so-called smart sanctions had obvious drawbacks, since Saddam could exploit the revenue from unrestricted oil sales to solidify his regime, but Abdullah’s argument was that he was more or less doing this anyway, and the United States needed to regain the initiative. It was certainly a self-serving position for Jordan, but that didn’t make it wrong.
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AS JORDAN’S CHALLENGE to the east became more worrisome, its dilemma to the west grew larger too. In that same conversation in Aqaba in late 2000 about Iraqi sanctions, the king expressed mounting concern about the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising that had been triggered by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount several weeks earlier. As he pointed out, Saddam was using the ugly spectacle in the West Bank to divert attention and pressure, and to fan regional animus toward American policy. Jordan was stuck in the middle, politically and physically. I cabled Washington later that day, restating the glaringly obvious: “It is important to take a step back and look soberly at the collateral damage that the unfolding tragedy across the river could do to relatively moderate countries like Jordan, which are not exactly a growth industry in this region these days.”15
When King Abdullah took the throne, things had looked more positive across the river. The Wye agreement, which his father had so heroically inspired, was the latest incremental step toward the two-state solution envisioned by the Oslo Accords of 1993. Progress had been painful and halting, but by the beginning of 1999 the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, exerted some degree of control over 40 percent of the West Bank, and most of Gaza. In May of that year, Labor’s Ehud Barak won the Israeli elections and ousted Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu, a leader in whom neither Abdullah nor his father had had much faith.
Early in Barak’s tenure, a new target of September 2000 was set for completion of negotiations about the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza, the latest in a series of moving goalposts since Oslo. Barak decided, however, to concentrate first on negotiations with Syria. He disliked the incrementalism of the Oslo process, which he thought maximized domestic political cost in Israel for minimal strategic gains. The Syria track offered a chance to produce a big strategic reward, removing the more serious security threat posed by the Assad regime, as well as building leverage on Arafat in subsequent negotiations. With Hafez al-Assad’s health a growing question mark, Barak felt a sense of urgency to test the possibility of an agreement with Syria.
Not surprisingly, the Palestinians were upset by Barak’s sense of priorities. They had been negotiating for years, and had made clear their commitment to reaching an agreement. Assad, who had not budged an inch, was being rewarded with Israeli attention. King Abdullah was nervous too. While he was supportive of an Israeli-Syrian deal, it was a two-state solution that mattered most to Jordan’s future. Establishment of a sovereign Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza would cement a sense of Jordanian national identity on the other side of the Jordan River, solidifying the unity of both East Bank Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian origin that Abdullah’s father had worked for nearly half a century to accomplish. It also promised economic opportunities for Jordan beyond the thus far meager results of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994. Nevertheless, Abdullah did what he could to support Syrian-Israeli negotiations, in hopes that a breakthrough there would accelerate Israeli-Palestinian progress.
Abdullah traveled to Damascus in April 1999, two months after Assad’s unexpected appearance at King Hussein’s funeral. Assad was relatively upbeat about improving relations with Jordan, including on the thorny issue of water resources, where Syria held the high cards through its control of the headwaters of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers. Abdullah also spent substantial time on that trip with Assad’s son and heir apparent, Bashar. On the surface, Abdullah and Bashar seemed to share a few traits. Both were in their thirties, part of a new generation of Arab leaders. Both had the experience of unexpected elevations, Bashar when his elder brother Basil died in a car crash, and Abdullah when his father changed the line of succession on his deathbed. And both thought of themselves as modernizers, although Bashar’s self-image was thinly drawn, the product of a year in London studying ophthalmology and his role as head of the Syrian Computer Society, as close to a hotbed of innovation as the deeply repressive Assad regime permitted.
Bashar took the king to the Alawite stronghold of Latakia on the Mediterranean, and drove him around the city for several hours while they talked about the region and the world. The king was a little bemused by Bashar’s apparent naïveté; he asked Abdullah at one point what jet lag felt like, explaining that the longest flights he had ever taken were to London and back. The king said, however, that he thought Bashar might be capable of breaking out of some of his father’s knuckle-dragging habits, and following through on any progress that might be made with the Israelis. Years later, the king ruefully acknowledged to me, “So much for first impressions.”
In January 2000, the United States hosted Israeli and Syrian delegations at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Barak led the Israeli team. The Syrian delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa, whose demeanor hadn’t grown much more flexible or conciliatory in the decade since he had strained Jim Baker’s patience at Madrid. The talks sputtered over nearly ten days with no breakthrough. In a final, high-stakes effort to reach a deal, Clinton met in Geneva in late March with a fast-failing Hafez al-Assad. Unconvinced that Barak would ever deliver the full return of Syrian territory occupied since the 1967 war, Assad refused to authorize the resumption of negotiations with the Israelis. The Syria track had run its course.
Barak and Clinton then turned to the Palestinian talks with renewed focus. Prodded by Barak, and hoping to cap his presidency with a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, Clinton decided to invite Arafat and Barak to Camp David, the scene of Jimmy Carter’s dramatic success with Sadat and Begin more than twenty years earlier. It was a significant gamble. The Israelis and Palestinians were far apart on how much of the West Bank would be returned, and even further apart on the questions of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return. Arafat feared that he would be blamed for a breakdown in talks, and knew how deep disillusionment already ran among Palestinians after all the unmet expectations of the Oslo years. Never a diplomatic risk-taker, Arafat came to Camp David with great reluctance, drawn largely by the investment he had made in Clinton and American leadership, and always confident that he could wriggle out of any tight political situation if he had to.
For King Abdullah, this was a difficult juncture. In barely two years on the throne, he knew that he couldn’t replicate the influence or prestige of his father, but he understood instinctively the importance of Jordan’s unique position, enjoying healthy relations with all three key players—Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans. He found the Camp David experience frustrating. For reasons that were partly understandable but also partly mistaken, the U.S. team at Camp David kept a tight lid over the more than two weeks of intense negotiations at the secluded presidential retreat. Key Arab players who might have helped encourage Arafat became an afterthought, and when they were consulted it was often with only the skimpiest of background.
On one occasion late in the talks, for example, a senior American official at Camp David placed a call to the king to ask for his help in persuading the Palestinians to show more flexibility on Jerusalem, but never provided any context on what exactly we were hoping to achieve, or what had transpired so far. Much to my embarrassment, I wasn’t any more successful in eliciting better information for the king. My concerns, however, were insignificant compared to the central dilemma: Despite herculean efforts by President Clinton, and unprecedented progress on the question of territory and the even more complex question of Jerusalem, the two sides were at an impasse. Camp David had c
ome further than any previous effort but ultimately ended with no agreement and plenty of resentments.
Despite earlier promises to the Palestinians, the United States—attuned more to Barak’s worsening domestic political predicament—appeared in the wake of Camp David to blame Arafat for the summit’s failure. With popular Palestinian anger rising, Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in late September set off a political firestorm, and in the ensuing violence a new Palestinian uprising was born. I accompanied King Abdullah to a meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh, where President Mubarak invited Barak, Arafat, and Clinton to try to find a way to ease the violence. It proved fruitless. The Israelis were intent upon driving home to the Palestinians that violence wouldn’t produce any positive political results, and often responded with disproportionate force; Arafat, always sensitive to the popular mood and never shy about indulging in violence if it helped keep his position as political ringmaster intact, often played a double game.
Our ambassador to Egypt, Dan Kurtzer, and I were deeply concerned about where all of this was headed. Over the next few months, we took the unusual step of sending joint messages to Washington. We felt a responsibility to inject our perspective into the negotiating process from the outside, if we could not provide our views from the inside. In December, we sent the third and final message:
As seen from Cairo and Amman, U.S. policy in the peace process and our overall posture in the region are still heading in exactly the wrong direction. With our interests under increasing scrutiny and attack, we are acting passively, reactively and defensively. There is no guarantee that a bolder, more activist American approach will stop the hemorrhaging—but it seems clear to us that things could get a lot worse unless we regain the initiative.
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