Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  A hero’s welcome awaited Hussein on his return to Amman. A crowd quickly gathered in the streets and greeted their monarch with scenes of tumultuous enthusiasm and great rejoicing. Hussein’s supporters made the most of the incident to boost his image as the brave king who was fighting the evil forces of communism. A few hours after his return, Hussein made a broadcast in which he thanked his people for their enthusiastic welcome and announced that he would not go abroad after all, as ‘the best holiday and the best place is here with you.’53 The next day was declared a public holiday. Tribal chiefs and other dignitaries went to the palace to congratulate the king on his escape. Crowds danced in the streets and shouted, ‘Long live the king!’ The king’s popularity shot up overnight, and there were signs of the new mood even on the normally hostile West Bank. Rumours spread that the king’s uncle had been with him in the airplane. Sharif Nasser was respected by the Bedouins for his bravery and generosity but regarded by the Palestinians as the man with the iron fist; it was said that he was going to murder Ali Abu Nuwar and that he was stopped from doing so only by the king. The monarchy in general had been unpopular, but at this point it suited Hussein to have all the complaints and criticism directed at his wicked uncle.54 The whole episode had a powerful effect in building up the Hussein legend of a brave and resourceful king surrounded on all sides by treacherous enemies. One British diplomat was quoted after the Syrian MiG episode as saying, ‘This is not a country but a geographical monument to the courage of one young man – Hussein.’55 In the eyes of the population at large the young man fully lived up to his title as ‘the Lion of Jordan’.

  9

  Arab Foes and Jewish Friends

  In the years between the 1958 revolution in Iraq and the June War of 1967, King Hussein continued to consolidate his position as Jordan’s principal policy-maker. He also became better known internationally as a result of his frequent visits abroad. As in previous years, Hussein took only a superficial and intermittent interest in economic affairs, delegating them to the government, while he himself was much more directly involved with the army and with foreign relations. The army was the key to the survival of the monarchy and, after the turmoil of the two previous years, it called for careful monitoring. Foreign relations moved in three main spheres: the West, the Arabs and Israel. In all of these Hussein’s conduct was governed by dynastic interests. None was predictable or stable. Inter-Arab politics revolved round the rivalry between the conservative and the revolutionary states in what was aptly dubbed ‘the Arab cold war’. These years also saw the emergence, with Nasser’s encouragement, of a Palestinian competitor to Hussein’s regime, and the transformation, partly as a result of Arab and Palestinian antagonism, of Hussein’s perception of Israel from deadly foe to secret friend and ally.

  The king’s advisers were divided into two rival factions who stood for different foreign policies. One faction was headed by Sharif Nasser. It included two members of the prominent tribal family from Kerak in the south: Hazza’ al-Majali, the chief of the royal court, and his cousin Habis al-Majali, the army chief of staff. This faction had a pro-British orientation. It advocated an uncompromising stand in confronting the UAR and a proactive policy of expanding Jordan’s role in regional politics. The second faction included Sadiq al-Shar’a, the deputy chief of staff, and Akif al-Fayez, the son of the shaikh of the powerful Bani Sakhr tribal confederation in northern Jordan. This group was allied to prime minister Samir Rifa’i and generally considered pro-American. It favoured a less confrontational policy towards the UAR and believed that Jordan should make an effort to reach accommodation with the radical Arab states. At stake were not just rival foreign and security policies but competition for political and economic power.1

  As 1958 turned into 1959, Hussein felt secure enough to embark on extended travels abroad. Between February and May he went on a world tour that helped to put Jordan on the map and greatly increased his own range of contacts and stature as a leader. Ahmad al-Lozi, who, as chief of royal protocol, accompanied Hussein on this world tour, has suggested that Hussein valued it as a vehicle to forging friendships between people, a bridge to international cooperation and a means of enabling leaders to discharge their joint responsibilities. One royal tour included Iran, Turkey, Spain, Morocco and some African countries that had yet to gain their independence, such as Ghana, Guinea and Kenya. The visit to Ethiopia produced an unusual gift. Emperor Haile Selasse gave Hussein two lion cubs and a guardian to look after them. The royal party took the cubs on the plane back to Amman, where they were kept in the garden of the palace. When they grew up, they were put in cages. The king used to visit them every day, until they died a few years later.2 Emperor Haile Selasse had as one of his many titles ‘the Lion of Judah’, and Hussein of course came to be called by his admirers ‘the Lion of Jordan’.

  By far the most important country on Hussein’s itinerary was the United States, where he went with a large party of aides and advisers in March 1959. The main purpose of the trip was to persuade the Eisenhower administration to increase its economic aid and arms supplies to Jordan; another aim was to present Jordan as a bastion of regional stability in the Middle East and as a strategic asset for the US in the cold war. The Jordanian line in the talks with American officials was essentially ‘You don’t count dollars and cents when your security is at stake.’ At the meeting with President Eisenhower at the White House, Hussein outlined his vision for a stable and peaceful Middle East and followed it with a powerful pitch for expanding American aid for his country. He criticized Nasser for helping to bring the Soviet Union into the Middle East and restated Jordan’s determination to stand up to Nasser and to preserve its independence. Hussein also rejected the notion that the Arab world could remain neutral in the cold war: he felt that they had to choose between the US and the USSR. Eisenhower was profoundly impressed with ‘the brave young king’, and made complimentary remarks about his courage and leadership; he also noted that, while Hussein was concerned with Israel, he realized the real danger to the Middle East was communist imperialism. On the public relations front Hussein also scored notable successes. He visited half a dozen American cities and made strong anti-communist speeches that went down well with his listeners, made him the darling of the conservative media and won him many friends in Congress. The concrete outcome of the trip was an aid package of $47.8 million. Beyond that, as Lawrence Tal has noted, the trip was important for Jordan’s future security because it established a personal basis for the relationship between the top decision-makers and their American opposite numbers.3

  Hussein’s five-week visit to the US coincided with a military plot against his regime. Shortly before his departure, Hussein’s intelligence service uncovered a plan by some army officers, with outside help, to stage a coup while he was abroad. Major-General Sadiq al-Shar’a was implicated, but there was no hard evidence against him. Hussein decided to take Shar’a with him as part of his entourage in order to keep him under surveillance. While they were in America, news came that thirteen Jordanian officers were arrested at home on a charge of plotting to overthrow the monarchy and to merge Jordan with the UAR. Shar’a showed increasing signs of anxiety and nervousness. During a stop in London on the return journey, he asked Hussein for permission to stay to undergo an operation on his leg. Permission was denied. Once back in Jordan, Shar’a was arrested, court martialled and sentenced to death. Hussein commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Four years later Shar’a was released from prison and appointed director of the Jordanian passport office.

  Like most plots in Jordanian history, this one was rather tangled, with almost as many different accounts of it as there were participants. The evidence produced in court to incriminate Shar’a was flimsy and certainly not solid enough to substantiate Hussein’s claim in his autobiography that the culprits planned to fire with heavy guns on the Zahran Palace where his family was living.4 Jamal Sha’er, a medical doctor and a Ba’thist who was working in Beirut at the time, cl
aimed that Shar’a sent him a messenger to say that he was about to make an attempt to overthrow the throne and to ask for his support. Sha’er also suggested that Shar’a and Rifa’i had very close links with the Americans and that they collaborated secretly against the regime. Shar’a himself admitted that he planned a coup, but he claimed it was directed against the army high command and not against the king. He told Peter Snow that he wanted to make some changes in the army in the interests of efficiency and that this must have led his opponents to denounce him, falsely, to the king.5

  The whole affair was part of a wider power struggle that pitted Shar’a and Rifa’i against Sharif Nasser, his sister Queen Zain and the close-knit Majali clan. Queen Zain still wielded considerable power and influence; she was determined to force Rifa’i out of office and to replace him with Hazza’ Majali. Majali, for his part, began to flex his muscles even before the king’s departure for the US. Shortly after his return, Hussein accepted Rifa’i’s resignation and called upon Hazza’ Majali to form a new government. Majali was less independent than his predecessor, and his rise to the top had involved a shift in the balance of power between the government and the palace. Majali’s entire cabinet consisted of loyalists. Its main goals were to carry out political and social reforms, to reduce corruption in public affairs and to keep the army from intervention in politics. His broader aim was to work towards some sort of a balance within the kingdom between north and south and between the East Bank and the West Bank. In foreign affairs, on the other hand, there was a shift towards a more aggressive policy of confrontation with the UAR.

  The policy was part of a broader concept of Jordan as a ‘Third Force’ in Arab politics. This was not a realistic aim, given Jordan’s size, poverty and fragility. The concept was never formalized in any doctrine or document but it was vigorously promoted by the Sharif Nasser faction, which argued that the split between republican Iraq and the UAR provided an opportunity for Jordan to establish itself as an independent centre of power in the region. In one sense this was simply the latest reincarnation of the old Hashemite ambition to unify the Fertile Crescent under their leadership, an ambition that King Abdullah had bequeathed to his grandson. Sharif Nasser and his colleagues, however, were not content to wait upon events but urged Hussein to seize the initiative and implement the Third Force idea by military means. They enjoyed Hussein’s trust, having stood by him in the crises of the previous two years, and they skilfully exploited his impulse to avenge the murder of his Iraqi cousins and his desire to strengthen his regional position. They persuaded him that the regime in Baghdad could be toppled easily because it faced considerable tribal opposition and that regime change there could have a knock-on effect in Syria and lead to the breakaway of Syria from the UAR. What they proposed was a Jordanian military assault on Iraq, spearheaded by an armoured division. Once Hussein was won over to the idea, the military men began to prepare more detailed operational plans.6

  The plan for a Jordanian military assault on Iraq encountered firm British opposition. Anyone who knew anything about military affairs realized that to invade a large country like Iraq without air cover (the Jordanian air force was tiny) was an act of insanity. But the British considered that action against Iraq risked not just a military disaster but the end of the regime in Jordan. Britain’s ambassador in Amman, Sir Charles Johnston, warned that the most probable beneficiary of such military action would be Nasser, and, not for the first time, he found an ally in Queen Zain. Zain also regarded Nasser and his Syrian stooges as inherently more dangerous to Jordan than Abd al-Karim Qasim, the prime minister of Iraq. She told Johnston: ‘The snake’s head is nearer than its tail,’ meaning that Damascus was nearer than Baghdad. The issue was eventually settled not by argument but by Britain’s refusal to allow its advisers to the Royal Jordanian Air Force (RJAF) to participate in the operation. In mid October, Hussein felt he had little choice but to call off the invasion. As a result of this decision, the Jordanian trigger-finger was brought under control, but there was a risk that it might not be the next time a crisis blew up in Iraq. The obvious course was for Hussein to sit back and watch the tug-of-war between Nasser and Qasim. But, as Johnston noted, there were other forces at play: ‘The King, who has inherited his Mother’s flair for Realpolitik, sees this clearly, but in time of crisis a combination of Iraqi émigré optimism, Bedouin pugnacity, Hashemite revanchisme and his own boyish exuberance could easily obscure his better judgement and send him down the road to Baghdad. How to stop him may well be one of our major preoccupations in 1960.’7

  As it turned out, one of Britain’s major preoccupations in 1960 was to stop Hussein from attacking Syria rather than Iraq. On 29 August 1960 Hazza’ Majali and twelve other Jordanians were killed by a bomb planted in Majali’s desk by UAR agents. Twenty minutes later there was a second explosion that Hussein surmised was intended for him. Hussein was not surprisingly enraged by the assassination of his prime minister and friend, and his first impulse was to avenge his death. He also came under strong pressure from Sharif Nasser, Habis Majali and their supporters in the army to retaliate. On Hussein’s orders, three brigades were assembled in the north for a lightning strike against Syria. One problem with the plan to march on Damascus, as with the earlier plan to march on Baghdad, had been that the ground forces could not be given air cover; another was that it exposed Jordan’s western flank to hostile action from Israel. Hussein needed an understanding with Israel, and he therefore initiated his first direct contact across the battle lines. On 14 September, Lieutenant-Colonel Emil Jamian, a confidant of the king, met secretly in Jerusalem with General Chaim Herzog, Israel’s director of military intelligence. Jamian told Herzog, ‘We shall have to thin out our forces on the border with Israel, and we are asking that you not take advantage of the situation by moving against us.’ Herzog promised to give an answer as soon as possible. After consulting prime minister David Ben-Gurion, Herzog gave Jordan a positive reply. The message from West Jerusalem to Amman said, ‘You may rest assured. You have our pledge.’8

  It took the combined pressure of the Western powers to prevail on Hussein to abort the operation. Queen Zain, who was on a visit to London, was asked by British officials to call her son and urge him to reconsider his decision. Charles Johnston, who was on the spot in Amman, gave avuncular advice to the king. In a private letter home, dated 25 September, Johnston wrote: ‘We have had some uphill work here over the last three weeks. The locals concentrated about a division in the desert facing the Syrian frontier, and everything seemed ready for a dash to Damascus to avenge the PM’s murder. I have had to see our neighbour [the king was also Johnston’s neighbour] at all hours of the day and night and tell him… that you can’t win in that sort of thing, that we tried at Suez and look where it got us, etc., that Jordan has a good case before the UN and it would be a pity to spoil it by committing suicide.’9 The Americans had their own reasons for discouraging Hussein. Their policy in the Middle East in the late 1950s and early 1960s consisted primarily of accommodating the populist pan-Arabism of President Nasser. The cornerstone of this policy was to maintain the regional status quo by opposing the pan-Arab ambitions of the Hashemites in Amman.10 In line with this, the American ambassador urged Hussein to weigh carefully the consequences of his action. Hussein realized he could not defy both Western powers, and he gave the order to cancel the plan for the march on Damascus. The episode served to underline to him the limits of Jordan’s power, and it led him to abandon the concept of a Third Force.

  Hussein’s conflict with the UAR continued, however, in terms of both ideology and propaganda. Radio Cairo denounced him as the ‘Judas of the Arabs’ and as nothing but a cog in the machinery of Western imperialism; he denounced his critics as the servants of Moscow. More unsettling were the repeated attempts by his enemies to have him assassinated. So numerous, cunning and varied were the plots against his person that he sometimes felt like the central character in a detective novel. In his own mind he divided the plots into two
categories. The first consisted of major coups aimed at overthrowing the monarchy and the downfall of Jordan. The second consisted of plots aimed at killing him. One such plot involved replacing the medicated nose drops that Hussein used for his sinus trouble with acid strong enough to dissolve the chromium in a bathroom washbasin. Another weird plot resulted in a large number of dead cats being found in the palace grounds. An investigation revealed that an assistant cook had been recruited by the Syrian Deuxième Bureau to poison the king. As the cook was not an expert in poisons, he experimented on the local cat population. This led to the arrest and imprisonment of the cook, until Hussein responded to a plea from the cook’s daughter by releasing him to celebrate a Muslim feast with his family.11 Plots and conspiracies were to dog Hussein for the rest of his life. He was always aware of the danger but he did not allow it to intimidate him. Like his grandfather, he had a rather fatalistic, typically Muslim attitude to death. But the risk and uncertainty were always there, reflected in the title of his autobiography, Uneasy Lies the Head.

  Most of the plots against Hussein and his regime were hatched by the UAR. The collapse of the union between Syria and Egypt therefore came as a great gift to him. On 28 September 1961 a group of officers overthrew the regime in Damascus and declared their country’s independence from Egypt. The rebellion took Hussein by complete surprise, but he welcomed it with enthusiasm and reacted with great speed. He immediately extended official recognition to the new government, and urged Britain and America to follow suit. At the same time he mobilized troops on the border with Syria and got ready to intervene to prevent a counter-coup by Nasser. To the American ambassador, William Macomber, Hussein made it clear that if Nasser did make a move against the new regime, Jordan would intervene militarily to assist it. Macomber was an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Brave Young King’, but on this occasion he was instructed by his superiors to warn Hussein that military intervention could engulf the whole area in conflict and that it might jeopardize America’s political and economic support for Jordan. Macomber reported back that, while Hussein was deferential to American views, he could be stubborn and defiant if he thought that his own long-term survival was at stake. Hussein, added Macomber, had long been convinced that his regime could not survive indefinitely in Jordan unless there was a break in the chain of hostility that surrounded him. He clearly viewed the Syrian rebellion as such a break and was determined to help the insurgents if Nasser moved against them.12 Nasser broke off diplomatic relations with Jordan, but he did not resort to force to reassert his authority in the northern province. Consequently, the crisis subsided to a point that permitted Hussein to withdraw the troops from his northern frontier.