DAWN - Opinion; 14 February, 1999
King Hussein's dual legacy
By Eqbal Ahmad
HUSSEIN Ibn Talal, at 63 young by today's standards, has been buried. Among the powerful men who came to bid him goodbye were all the American presidents who are alive - Bill Clinton plus Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush. The Israelis arrived in force. The 'bad' Arabs - Muammar Qadhafi and Saddam Hussein - advisedly stayed back. So did Iran's Mohammed Khatami. The PLO leader turned good Arab was predictably there, wiping tears. Even Boris Yeltsin dragged his wobbly self into Amman.
The American media described it as the "diplomatic funeral of the century". The editorial in the New York Times eulogized the "power of the peacemaking man ... In death, King Hussein was able to do one more time what he often did while living - draw together divided men." "Forceful and compassionate advocate of Arab-Israeli peace" echoed the Washington Post. How sweetly diplomacy deals with death!
How cynical are the media in the great democracies, and how in tune with the purposes of power. Could they have really forgotten their governments' and their own denunciations of King Hussein? Jordan's monarch was in fact distinguished among Arab rulers for sustaining repeated punishments, administered intermittently each time he dared stray away from their preferences. To his credit he did dare more than once. Yet as he was dying and after he was gone, all the presidents and their men lacked the simple humanity to recall or regret the punishments that they had inflicted upon him each time he revealed an Arab heart.
The last time was in 1991. He did not quite fall in line behind Washington's determination to invade Iraq and insert American forces in the Middle East. Boy, did George Bush, his aides plus the reporters, editors and pundits piled on him. As often happens in such cases, to pillory him they misrepresented, exaggerated and lied. He was portrayed as an ally of Saddam Hussein, supporter of the aggression against Kuwait, an unstable potentate, autocratic monarch, and a born loser. The New York Times gave ample space even to its bete noire, the Saudi Arabian ambassador - a prince what else? - to insult Hussein and accuse him of cowardice in failing to defend Jerusalem, an Islamic sanctuary under the guardianship in 1967 of the Hashemite dynasty.
The allegations that were repeated daily and for months were not true. Hussein did not support Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. He did not form an alliance with Iraq. On the contrary, he openly advocated Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. What he tried to avert was a full-scale American invasion of the Gulf. Variously, he sought an Arab solution to an Arab problem, a judicious and patient international effort to end the crisis, and time to let diplomacy prevail. The United States, on the other hand, viewed Saddam Hussein's aggression as an opportunity not to be missed. Since the early 1970s, the Middle East had become the primary focus of the American struggle to maintain its status as a world power. The region was targeted as the centre-piece of the Nixon Doctrine.
With modernized and mobile naval deployments, large bases in such places as Diego Garcia, Sicily and Oman, large stockpiles of arms in Saudi Arabia, and a strategic ally as primed as Israel, Washington had waited for an opportunity to go in and assert the paramountcy of American power in the oil depot of Europe and Japan. Saddam Hussein opened the gates. In the smallest possible way, King Hussein appeared to stand in the way of Operation Desert Storm. For his impudence Jordan's 'plucky little king' was maligned and punished.
The United States government and its allies in Gulf added injuries to the insults. Jordan's lifelines - in financial aid, credits, arms and spare parts, even the supply of oil - were cut off. The harsh economic embargo nearly broke Jordan's back. Unemployment rose to some 40% of the labour force, the number of Jordanians below the poverty line ($136.00 per month for a family of 6.5 persons) increased four-fold, and the health environment deteriorated so badly that in 1994 the World Health Organization warned of the "possible re-emergence of previously eradicated diseases." Read all the gushing editorials and obituaries, you will scarcely find a hint of the beating "the peacemaker" took from American officials and their mimickmen in the media.
The ruler of the kingdom which, from the time of its caesarean birth in March 1946 had suffered from dependency first on Britain then the United States, was hardly in a position to withstand Washington's torture without even a pretence of solidarity from the rich Arab states. Eventually he crossed over to reach a formal peace with Israel, a crossing made easier by Yasser Arafat's simultaneous surrender to the Israeli-American agenda. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and Middle East expert has nowhere any of these unpleasant details, yet he asserts deadpan that " when it came to the game of nation-building, King Hussein deserves to be remembered as an Arab superpower." "In neighbourhood of brutal thugs", writes Mr. Friedman, "he operated with a basic decency." Ironically, he is not referring here to George Bush and Jim Baker, Yitzhak Rabin or Benjamin Netanyahu, Abraham Rosenthal or Thomas Friedman. Some journalism!
A similar treatment had been accorded to the much-eulogized Hussein of Jordan when he joined Gamal Abdul Nasser against Israel in 1967. On the other hand, his pro-American posture and CIA connections, his 1970 war with the PLO, and his secret dealings with Israeli leaders have caused many Arab radicals to denounce him bitterly. Hussein was often caught in the cross-fire because he was a man in-between, an heir to the dual legacy of Arab nationalism and western imperial patronage. His tragedy and limitations have not been fully understood. He was a victim of two forces - imperialism and nationalism - which throughout this century have interacted in the Arab world in an unequal relationship of antagonistic collaboration. The unresolved equation between these two forces has contributed greatly to the crisis of state and society in the Middle East.
King Hussein operated at the centre of this contradiction. The Arab revolt during World War 1 was the defining moment in the development of Arab nationalism. Its hated other was the dying Ottoman empire, not the strident British or French imperialism. Rather, the latter were the Arab nationalists' apparent benefactors and patrons who made large promises, delivered in meager pieces, not enough to satisfy the Arab players' political and territorial appetites but just enough to keep them compromised and dependent.
From the start of this debilitating process the Hashemites were entrapped in it. Hussein, the Amir of Hejaz, shifted his loyalties from the Ottoman to the British, and helped ignite the Arab revolt in June 1916. The Brits were not given to keeping promises. At the war's victorious end Hussein did not become the unifier of the Arab world, and passed his embittered last days as an exile in Cyprus.
The region was parcellized instead into little entities called Mandates held by Britain and France. The Zionist, then leading a small settler movement was promised a "homeland" in Palestine, a British Mandate. The ascendant Saudis drove Hussein out of Hejaz. The British did not intervene on his behalf. Later they appointed his elder son Faysal as the king of Iraq where he ruled until July 1958 when he was killed in the military coup that overthrew the monarchy. Amir Hussein's second son Abdullah, King Hussein's grandfather and his role model, was assigned the emirate of Transjordan which in March 1946 became the sovereign state of Jordan.
A pan-Arabist dependant on Britain, Abdullah participated in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 (with a British commander Glubb Pasha leading his Arab Legion) and took a portion of the Palestine Mandate under his control. His son Talal was incapacitated. So upon reaching majority in May 1953, grandson Hussein Ibn Talal became the king of Jordan. The declining British gradually passed their spheres of influence to their American cousins. In 1967, without American approval King Hussein allied with Egypt and Syria against Israel, and lost control over the remainder of Palestine, including Jerusalem. That's when he personally experienced the dark side of the free world and its media.
The compulsions which rendered Hussein punishable in American eyes were not only subjective and ideological. More than a half - by now some 67% - of the people in the desert kingdom are displaced Palestinians or their descendants. They know that Zionism alone is not the cause of their national tragedy. By instinct they are anti-imperialist and Arab nationalists. When the lines are clearly drawn, a cautious Jordanian monarch cannot afford to defy their collective feeling. King Hussein was a survivor by instinct and common sense. He knew when taking sides 1967-style and when dancing on the fence - as in 1991- was essential to the survival of his dynasty.
In 1991, many observers were surprised by his refusal to get behind American-led Operation Desert Storm. They did not take Jordanian realities into account: the intifada was raging in occupied Palestine, children had their eyes gouged by rubber bullets, thousands of unarmed minors had been murdered by Israel's forces, and Palestinians of Jordan lived in shame and anxiety when Saddam Hussein defied their tormentors whom they did not believe to be Israelis alone.
Abdullah II inherits an uneasy throne in an uncertain world of continuous and deep pain. He has inherited a false and unjust peace with Israel which the superpower expects him to keep while it lets Israel violate its terms with impunity. He has displaced a popular uncle who has been viewed by citizens as more capable of protesting Israel's expansions and withstanding American pressures. He rules a restive people who have now suffered a decade of economic downturn. He lives in a tormented neighbourhood where in one country (Iraq) bombs rain while children and old people die of malnutrition and lack of medicines; in another country (Syria) a sick old dictator holds together a divided and discontented land; and next door bands of armed zealots are aided by a militarized state to dispossess and torment the hapless indigenous Arabs.
"He is a chip off the old block," assures an American pundit. "He clearly understands his mission", says the President of the United States. "Iran remains a threat to the security of certain Gulf states" said the new king on the eve of his coronation. "We are on the same sheet of music" is how he described his agreement with US policy on Iraq. That is too much pleasing, too openly and too soon. It is most unlikely that the wily old king would have done that at this time.