Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  The entire saga of the peace process revolved round the tension between a comprehensive settlement and a separate settlement. The accords that were eventually concluded at Camp David were incompatible with the basic principles of Jordanian foreign policy. Hussein understood that Israel and Egypt ranked much higher than Jordan on the list of America’s allies in the Middle East. But he felt that, in his desperate search for a foreign policy success, Carter made the Arabs pay the price for Israel’s intransigence. There was no way that Jordan could negotiate on the basis that the West Bank was Israeli-liberated territory. Nor could Jordan afford to play the dangerous and humiliating role spelled out for it in its absence: to act as Israel’s policeman in the occupied territories and to safeguard Israel’s security while it pursued its expansionist project. After a long period of sitting on the fence, Hussein therefore finally decided to come down on the side of the Arab rejectionists. Hussein’s Arab opponents habitually portrayed him as an American stooge. In 1978, however, he defied strong American pressure to make peace on Israel’s terms. Paradoxically, from his point of view, the one good thing that came out of Camp David was the breaking of the taboo on direct peace negotiations with Israel.

  19

  Lebanon and the Reagan Plan

  The most momentous event in the private life of Hussein in 1978 was his marriage to Lisa Halaby in a simple ceremony in Amman on 15 June. She was a highly intelligent, cosmopolitan and strikingly beautiful blonde: slim, athletic and tall. She was considerably taller than the man she married and younger by sixteen years. She was born into a prominent Arab–American family, raised in privilege and sent to exclusive private schools. Her father, Najeeb Halaby, was a successful businessman and an aviation executive. Lisa Halaby joined the first class at Princeton to accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban planning. After graduating, she worked in the urban planning field in Australia and Iran before joining Royal Jordanian Airlines as director of planning and design projects.

  In 2003 Lisa Halaby published a revealing and engaging autobiographical book. Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life is the story of her remarkable journey into Hussein’s heart and of the twenty-one years of their marriage, ending with the king’s death in 1999. For the king it was evidently love at first sight. Following her move to Jordan, Lisa had several fleeting encounters with Hussein, usually in Amman airport. For the young and independent-minded American woman, the courtship involved some doubts and hesitations. The king was a widower with eight children from three previous marriages and a reputation as a playboy. ‘I will not deny that the idea of being his fourth wife, or anybody’s fourth wife, was troubling to me,’ she writes.1 But the king was an assiduous suitor; he would even sing to her.

  Having accepted the royal proposal of marriage, Lisa Halaby changed her name to Noor Al Hussein, the ‘Light of Hussein’. She also converted to Islam and began to learn Arabic in earnest. She became a stepmother to Hussein’s eight children, including his very young children with Alia. In the early years of their marriage, Noor gave birth to four more children: Hamzah, Hashim, Iman and Raiyah. Her love affair with Hussein developed into a love affair with his desert kingdom. As well as being an intimate portrait of a marriage and motherhood, Leap of Faith conveys a deep commitment to the people, culture and natural beauty of Jordan. ‘I had found myself spellbound,’ writes Noor, ‘by the serene expanse of desert landscape washed golden by the retreating sun at dusk. I was overwhelmed by an extraordinary sensation of belonging, an almost mystical sense of peace.’2

  There was precious little peace, however, inside the royal palace. Noor realized that she had to make adjustments to her new environment, but she found the lack of privacy irksome and unsettling. Court officials were ubiquitous and constantly intruded into what she regarded as her private space. Noor also had to fight to carve out a meaningful role for herself. Many in Jordan thought a queen should be a glamorous figure on a pedestal, perhaps engaged from a distance in charity work. Noor had no intention of being a mere figurehead and spending her time simply opening bazaars and exhibitions. On the contrary, she wanted to be involved in tackling real problems.

  Through the United Nations and other organizations Noor became involved in issues that were important to her, such as global peacekeeping, refugee assistance and the Land Mine Ban Treaty. Most of her time and energy, however, were taken up with work in the areas of women’s and children’s welfare, human rights, health, education and the environment. She became acutely aware that all of these problems, which were tackled in isolation by individual ministries and charities, were fundamentally interrelated. Her role, as she saw it, was to serve as a catalyst for consensus-building and action. In 1985 the Noor Al Hussein Foundation was established. Its aim was to provide strategies for sustainable development in Jordan and to integrate efforts to tackle these various problems in a concerted manner.

  While Hussein supported his wife’s domestic initiatives, he himself remained mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs and with his quest for peace in the Middle East. International politics thus became a constant companion to Queen Noor throughout the years of her marriage. One theme that crops up again and again in the narrative of Leap of Faith is the frustration and anger she feels in the face of American double standards towards the Middle East. From Jordan she began to see the land of her birth through new eyes – and the image that she saw of America was not a positive one. Noor had grown up believing in America’s commitment to freedom, justice and human rights, but she gives many examples of Washington’s failure to uphold these principles in its treatment of Jordan. She complains, with justice, that America’s support for Israel has too often been at the expense of Arab human rights and in violation of international law and United Nations resolutions. During the 1980s Noor undertook several intensive speaking tours in America, gruelling two-week marathons of speeches and interviews. She was uniquely placed to educate her fellow Americans about the problems of the region and did her best to do so, but Israel had a magical hold on the American media and the American political psyche generally. A Jordan Information Office was established in Washington, but it was no match for the Israel lobby.

  Whereas in foreign affairs Noor was a valuable source of advice and support to her husband, in domestic politics being a foreigner often counted against her. On at least one issue Noor was at odds with her husband and the leaders of her adopted country: press freedom. From the first years of their marriage, she started lobbying her husband and his key officials to reconsider their restrictive attitude towards personal and institutional freedoms. The press in Jordan, though privately owned, was effectively government controlled. Truly independent reporting did not exist. A combination of conservatism and insecurity made the government apprehensive about allowing the people to read dissenting opinions and about the destabilizing impact of free political reporting. By her own account, Noor’s pleas fell on largely deaf ears.3

  The early years of Hussein’s marriage to Noor coincided with considerable turbulence in the region, beginning with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and ending with the Lebanon War. The shah of Iran was an old personal friend and ally, and his fall from power on 1 February 1979 was to Hussein a deeply worrying event. The designation of the shah as ‘the policeman of the Gulf’ reflected his country’s importance in American eyes for maintaining regional stability. Now the policeman was gone and his place was taken by Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shi’ite cleric and the leader of the Islamic Revolution. Hussein’s friendship with the shah did not stand him in good stead with the new rulers of Iran, who referred to him as ‘Shah Hussein’. The new rulers also threatened Jordan by their support for the PLO and the Palestinian revolutionary groups. Hussein feared that an alliance between the two revolutionary movements would have a radicalizing effect on the Palestinian refugees. But beyond his immediate concerns, Hussein could see the danger that this new regime posed to the security and stability of the entire Gulf. Khomeini openly declared his ambi
tion to export his version of the Islamic Revolution beyond Iran’s borders and to topple the corrupt Sunni monarchies of the Gulf. So, following the inauguration of the reign of the ayatollahs in Iran, Hussein and Crown Prince Hassan redoubled their efforts to present Jordan to the West as a bastion of stability in a turbulent region. They emphasized Jordan’s reasonableness and moderation and its rejection of all extremist doctrines, be they of the Islamic or the communist variety. But while Jordan could serve as an example, it could not match the Islamic Republic of Iran either in power or in popular appeal. An effective counterweight to balance Iran was needed, and the Arab country best qualified to play that part was Iraq.

  The Gulf states also looked to Iraq for protection against Iran because they were weak and vulnerable, even virtually defenceless, and certainly no match for Iranian military power either individually or collectively. Oman was still preoccupied with domestic affairs after suppressing an insurgency in Dhofar. Qatar had a population of 150,000. The United Arab Emirates were tiny. So was Kuwait. Saudi Arabia was an economic giant but a military dwarf. Gulf stability rested essentially on the balance of power between Iran and Iraq. Khomeini was deeply hostile to Iraq and openly incited Iraq’s Shi’ite population to rise up and overthrow their secular Ba’thi oppressors. On 17 September 1980 Saddam, who was by now president, launched a full-scale attack on Iran. Hussein went to Baghdad to find out from Saddam the reasons for this attack. Saddam replied that Crown Prince Fahd had encouraged him to do so. Prince Fahd had allegedly told Saddam Hussein that if he attacked Iran, the Saudis would support him financially. Saddam also thought that the internal upheaval in Iran provided Iraq with a unique chance to regain the strategically vital Shatt al-Arab Waterway, which was his declared war aim. Iran was in disarray following the revolution, and there was fear that the revolution would indeed begin to spread. This, said Saddam, was the golden opportunity to neutralize Iran.4

  Islamic Iran turned out to be a much tougher military opponent than Saddam had expected. The Iran–Iraq War lasted eight gruelling years, from 1980 until 1988. From the outset Jordan backed Iraq against Iran. The war transformed the personal friendship between the two rulers into an enduring strategic alliance between their countries. Jordan began to support Iraq so as to contain the spread of the Islamic Revolution, defend the Arab homeland and protect the Gulf monarchies. A special logistics and supply unit, the Yarmouk Brigade, was formed from exservice volunteers and sent to assist the Iraqi war effort. The Yarmouk Brigade did not take part in actual fighting, but it freed Iraqi personnel for front-line duty. Hussein used his extensive connections abroad to support Iraq in terms of public relations and to explain that Iraq was also defending vital Western interests in keeping the oil flowing and its price down. The Western powers encouraged Hussein to persist in his efforts to mobilize international and Arab support behind Iraq. America in particular looked with favour on the emerging front against Iran because Iran became its main enemy in the region after the fall of the shah. Hussein played a minor part in bringing Saddam and the CIA together to collaborate against the common enemy, but Saddam had his own independent link with the CIA through his half-brother Barzan Takriti, the director of military intelligence who later became ambassador to Geneva. CIA officers warned Saddam twice about plans for coups against him, once in 1979 and once in the early 1980s, and they informed the Jordanians of what they had done. Every time Hussein asked the CIA to support Saddam, the reply was that they had always supported him. And when the Iranians looked like gaining the upper hand, Hussein pleaded with the Americans to give Saddam more tangible support. The general view in Hussein’s inner circle was that, had it not been for American support, the Iranians would have crushed Saddam’s forces.5

  There were economic as well as geostrategic reasons for Jordan’s support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. The oil-producing oligarchies of the Gulf, and especially Saudi Arabia, were now virtually Jordan’s only source of foreign financial help. Had these regimes been toppled, foreign aid to Jordan would have dried up. Jordan also depended on oil from Iraq: Jordan’s only refinery was geared to take Iraq’s ‘heavy’ type of crude oil. This gave Saddam great leverage over Jordan. Jordan benefited directly from the war between Iraq and Iran. Many factories were built in Jordan to export goods to Iraq, and there was a particularly significant expansion in the transport sector. Because Iraq is practically landlocked and Basra was blocked by the war, the Jordanian port of Aqaba on the Red Sea became the principal transit point in the supply of goods and services to Iraq. Finally, Jordan derived significant benefits from its military missions to friendly Gulf states during the 1970s and 1980s. Jordan had the most impressive army in the Arab world, the best trained and the most professional if not the best equipped, and it was very willing to extend advice and assistance to the conservative monarchies of the Arabian peninsula. If Jordan had the military expertise, they had the wealth. Personal relations between Hussein and the ruler of the individual Gulf State concerned invariably determined the scope and nature of military cooperation.

  Jordan’s oldest and most extensive military assistance programme was to Oman. Sultan Qaboos ibn Said, the ruler of Oman, deposed his father in a bloodless coup in 1970. His aim was to develop and modernize his country but before he could do so he had to bring under control the leftist insurgency in the south-western region of Dhofar. Jordan offered him not only advice and training but its own troops to fight the insurgents. Hussein and Qaboos were kindred spirits: both had been to Sandhurst; both were friendly to the West; and both shared a pragmatic attitude towards Israel. By the mid 1970s the situation was stable enough for Qaboos to start building a modern military, with Hussein as his guide. Air Marshal Sir Erik Bennett went to Oman in 1975 on Hussein’s recommendation to create an air force out of a ragtag collection of aircraft. Qaboos wanted a comprehensive assessment of the threats facing his realm and advice on strategies to deal with them. Twenty people in foreign uniform arrived in an aircraft, spent several weeks in Oman, produced a report and left. An American ambassador to Oman a decade later was told that the foreign advisers were from Israel and that the broker had been Hussein. Qaboos showed his appreciation by giving Hussein very generous financial support.6 The number of Jordanian military advisers in the Gulf increased rapidly following Khomeini’s rise to power. Jordanian officers were seconded to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other states which felt the need to retrain and re-equip their armies. Bahrain, for example, engaged General Ihsan Shurdom, the retired chief of the Jordanian Air Force, to advise them on the training of pilots and the purchase of aircraft. Income was generated for the Jordanian Army and for the royal purse from the provision of these services.

  The one Arab country with which Jordan’s relations became strained after the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War, apart from Egypt, was Syria. A rapprochement had taken place as a result of Jordan’s rejection of the Camp David Accords. But the war with Iran rekindled tensions between Syria and Jordan, Iraq’s new ally. Both Iraq and Syria were ruled by Ba’th parties, but they were bitter rivals and Syria supported Iran in the war against Iraq. American support for Saddam was one of the considerations that led Asad to take the unusual step of backing a non-Arab state against fellow Arabs. Saddam was getting support from most of the Arab world, and Asad’s worry was that the Iraqi Ba’th would overthrow his regime and take power in Syria. Asad suspected that Hussein was plotting against him with Saddam and that he was trying to foment domestic strife in Syria by inciting the Islamic opposition against the regime. In November 1980 Syria mobilized its army on Jordan’s northern border, giving Jordanian support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a small ultra-conservative group opposed to the Ba’th regime, as the reason for its action. The immediate crisis was defused, but the underlying tension remained.

  The alliance with Iraq helped Hussein to pursue his traditional policy of maintaining a regional equilibrium and to fend off threats from whatever source: Iran, Syria or Israel. The Likud government became
more hardline and more aggressive in its attitude to the Arab world following the conclusion of the peace treaty with Egypt in March 1979. Sadat was assassinated in October 1981 by a fundamentalist officer from his own army, but his successor, Hosni Mubarak, persevered in his policy of peace and normalization with Israel. The Likud used the treaty with Egypt not to go forward with the peace process but to consolidate its control of the West Bank and to act with impunity towards the rest of the Arab world. In July 1980 it passed the Jerusalem Law, which stated that ‘Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.’ The motive behind this was to foreclose any negotiations over the status of the city; the New York Times called it ‘capital folly’.In June 1981 the Israeli Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad, and in December the Knesset extended Israeli law, jurisdiction and civil administration to the Golan Heights, which had been under military occupation since 1967. The composition of Menachem Begin’s government also changed in a more hawkish direction following the resignations of Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman. Itzhak Shamir, a former leader of the terrorist Stern Gang and an opponent of withdrawal from any of the occupied territories, became foreign minister. Ariel Sharon, the most aggressive general in the history of the IDF, became minister of defence. Sharon continued to hold the view that the Hashemite regime in Jordan was the chief obstacle to the incorporation of the West Bank into Greater Israel.