Why four presidents went to Jordan
King Hussein's role in the Middle East
By Richard Becker
The death on Feb. 7 of King Hussein of Jordan,
who ruled for more than 45 years, was treated with great, if
hypocritical, sympathy by the U.S. corporate media. President
Bill Clinton and ex-presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and
George Bush, as well as many other heads of state and
dignitaries, attended the king's funeral.
Clinton, at a Feb. 4 White House breakfast,
murmured words of prayer for "our king."
Why, the question might be asked, such
favorable coverage from media which frequently inject a heavy
dose of anti-Arab racism into their Middle East reporting? The
answer is clear: For most of his lengthy reign, Hussein
operated as a close ally and agent for U.S. imperialist
interests in this strategic region.
The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, like Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and other monarchies in the region, was created
by British imperialism in the post-World War I era. After World
War II, the United States displaced Britain as the protector
and overlord of these regimes.
During the first imperialist world war of 1914
to 1918, the British and French fought the old Ottoman
(Turkish) Empire, which ruled most of the Middle East. The
British promised the Arab people that if they fought Ottoman
rule, Britain would support their right to independence after
the war.
Britain, France divide Middle East
At the same time, in 1915, the British and
French were signing the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty, dividing the
region between them. The French got Syria, Lebanon and a share
of Iraq's oil wealth; the British got Palestine, Iraq and
Jordan. The British already controlled Yemen, Oman, Kuwait,
Egypt, the Sudan, Iran and parts of present-day Saudi Arabia;
Algeria and Tunisia were under French colonial rule.
When the Arab masses found out about this
betrayal, there were rebellions in Palestine, Syria and Iraq.
As a form of consolation and to win over the feudal leaders,
the British created the colonial monarchies of Iraq and Jordan,
then known as Transjordan, placing on the thrones two brothers
from the Hashemite family. Feisal became king of Iraq and
Abdullah king of Jordan.
No such entity as Jordan had existed
previously. The new country had a small, scattered population
and very few economic resources.
When the state of Israel was created in 1947-48
out of Palestine, King Abdullah had already been collaborating
with the Zionist leaders for more than 20 years. Jordan annexed
the West Bank and half of Jerusalem in the 1948 war, during
which 800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homeland to
make way for Israel. Many went to the West Bank and Jordan,
radically changing the make-up of the population.
Today, Palestinians are 70 percent of
Jordan's
population.
Palestinian nationalists assassinated King
Abdullah in 1951 in Jerusalem. Standing at his side on that day
was his grandson, Hussein, then 16 years old. Hussein was
quickly shipped off for a crash course at the Royal Military
Academy at Sandhurst, England. In 1953, he was installed on the
throne, although real power remained in British hands. The head
of Jordan's army at the time was Major John Glubb, an
Englishman.
In the mid-1950s, the growing wave of Arab
nationalism swept over Jordan as well. Known as a high-living
playboy from a very poor country, King Hussein was widely
regarded with contempt as an agent of the West by leftist and
nationalist forces. In 1956, Hussein removed the only
progressive government in Jordan's history and declared martial
law. But the tide of history was running against the king.
Iraqi revolution topples monarchy
In 1958, Egypt and Syria combined to form the
United Arab Republic with Gamal Abdel Nasser as president. The
same year, a momentous revolution swept away the monarchy in
neighboring Iraq, and broke the British-U.S. stranglehold on
the country. Hussein's cousin, King Feisal, about the same age
as Hussein, was the recipient of popular justice from the
long-suffering Iraqi masses.
In all likelihood, 1958 would have marked the
end of King Hussein's reign had it not been for British and
U.S. intervention. Two days after the Iraqi revolution, 6,000
British paratroopers landed in Jordan. At the same time, 20,000
U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. Both the Jordanian and
Lebanese regimes had been in immediate danger of going the way
of the corrupt Iraqi puppet monarchy.
In the wake of the Iraqi revolution, described
by President Eisenhower as "the gravest threat since the Korean
war," the U.S. and British made plans to invade Iraq. They had
Hussein proclaim that he would soon lead an invasion of Iraq to
restore Hashemite rule and avenge his cousin's death, something
which he had neither the resources nor army to carry out. The
only way Hussein could have gotten to Baghdad in 1958 was in
the baggage of a U.S.-British column.
But the sweeping nature of the Iraqi
revolution, and the support it received from the Soviet Union,
China and the Arab nationalist governments and masses, forced
the imperialists to temporarily back off.
In this same period, the U.S. displaced Britain
as the primary power in Jordan. The Central Intelligence Agency
warned Hussein of several plots to overthrow and/or assassinate
him in 1957-58. It also began to send the young prince monthly
checks (New York Times, Feb. 8), as well as military aid.
Hussein secretly opened contacts with Israel in
the early 1960s, when a state of war existed between the
settler state and all Arab countries. Over the years, he
collaborated with various Israeli governments, providing
intelligence information and other assistance.
This didn't stop the expansionist Israelis from
seizing the rest of historic Palestine in a six-day blitz
campaign in 1967. The West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem were taken
over, and hundreds of thousands more Palestinian refugees were
forced into Jordan, increasing the population by 50
percent.
1970 attack on Palestinians
In response to the tremendous upsurge in
Palestinian organizing and mobilization, Hussein's forces,
backed by the U.S. and with Israeli troops on stand-by,
launched a major assault on Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) forces inside Jordan in 1970. More than 20,000
Palestinians were killed, many in massacres, and the PLO was
forced out of Jordan by the attacks, which continued for more
than a year.
Three years later, as Egypt and Syria prepared
a new offensive to regain their territory stolen by Israel in
the 1967 war, King Hussein secretly flew to Tel Aviv to warn
the Israeli government. He passed on the same information to
Washington.
While the corporate media always projected a
smiling and benevolent image of the king to U.S. audiences, the
reality was that he presided over a ruthless police state,
which commonly practiced torture and harsh imprisonment against
Palestinian and nationalist activists.
Hussein changed course for a short period
beginning in 1988, a few months after the Palestinian Intifada
began. It was this brief time, lasting until 1992, that gave
Hussein's reign its only and very limited nationalist
credentials.
The Intifada was a powerful and ongoing state
of rebellion in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which created
a situation of dual power between the PLO and Israeli
authorities in those areas. The Intifada began to spread into
Jordan, threatening Hussein's control.
The king responded by moving to accommodate the
new reality. He renounced all claims to the West Bank in favor
of the PLO, and allowed a certain degree of democratization of
Jordan's political process, letting left, nationalist and
Islamic parties run in the elections. This was a period of
heightened mobilization and radicalization among Palestinians
and the king's new support for a West Bank/Gaza state was meant
to divert Palestinian pressure away from his government.
Aftermath of Gulf War
When the Gulf crisis broke out in 1990, public
opinion in Jordan was overwhelmingly and militantly on the side
of Iraq. Opposition to the U.S. was intense, as was hatred of
the parasitic Kuwaiti royal family, which depended on U.S.
imperialism for its survival. This situation prevented Hussein
from joining the U.S.-led "coalition" against Iraq in the Gulf
War, despite heavy pressure from Washington, London and Saudi
Arabia. The king feared that joining the anti-Iraqi alliance
might well mean civil war at home.
Jordan was also heavily dependent economically
on Iraq for oil and trade.
As a result of the war and Iraq's defeat,
hundreds of thousands more Palestinians, who had run Kuwaiti
society although never allowed to be citizens there, were
forced into a second exile. Most of them came to Jordan,
deepening the country's economic crisis.
By 1993, however, following Iraq's defeat, the
end of the Palestinian Intifada and the Oslo "peace process"
between the U.S., Israel and the PLO, Hussein returned to his
former path and was welcomed back into the fold by
Washington.
In 1994 Hussein openly bound his future and his
country's to making a separate peace with Israel and pressuring
the Palestinians to accept an agreement, which fell short of an
independent state. He was increasingly promoted in the media
here as the "voice of reason" and a true "friend" of U.S. and
Israeli leaders.
Inside Jordan, however, and in the Arab world
as a whole, it was very different. The peace agreement, which
was supposed to usher in a new period of economic development,
has accomplished nothing of the kind. The economic crisis in
Jordan has instead deepened, and the treaty with Israel has
come to be widely and derisively spoken of as "the king's
peace."
Hussein's most important role, from
Washington's viewpoint, was that he generally gave cover as an
Arab "leader" for imperialism's agenda in this strategically
crucial region.
The public mourning over Hussein's death may be
largely an expression of fear over the future under his largely
unknown son Abdullah II. The U.S. has sent emergency aid of
$250 million to help get through the crisis of transition.
The mourning in U.S. ruling circles over the
loss of their trusted ally and servant is to a certain extent
real. They are fearful of a new element of uncertainty in an
area where, due to the blockade and war against Iraq, the
denial of Palestinian self-determination, and the growing
domination by the U.S., mass anger is growing.
This article is copyright under a Creative
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