Avi Shlaim is an Iraqi-born academic, reared in Israel and long resident in
Britain, who writes about the Middle East with exceptional wisdom and
insight. The only disappointment about his latest book is its title, which
seems inappropriate. Rather than a lion, the man who ruled Jordan from 1953,
when he was 17, until his death in 1999, was surely a fire-walker.
The monarch of a small desert country with no oil, he was dependent for cash
on a shifting cast of foreign friends. The CIA threw in millions when
relations with the British became fractious, and so later did Saddam Hussein
and the Gulf states. Some of this was spent on funding Hussein’s lifestyle –
girls, mansions in Britain and fast cars. Most of it went on his army.
He accepted personal commissions on every big foreign deal, unlike his younger
brother Prince Hassan, who was both honest and deeply concerned for the fate
of his fellow countrymen. Shlaim writes of Hussein’s “deplorable neglect of
internal affairs and especially the welfare of his people”. The condition of
ordinary Jordanians remained pretty abysmal throughout his reign. Public
sentiment periodically exploded, for instance in the “bread riots” of 1989.
Hussein was driven by a single imperative: determination to preserve his own
throne and the Hashemite dynasty. His success in achieving this, amid
relentless murder plots and upheavals, and against every prediction of
foreign intelligence services and diplomats, inspired admiration in the
West, if not in the Arab world.
The king had charm and perfect manners – he addressed even visiting
journalists as “sir”. He was almost unique among Arab leaders in liking
westerners – he married two of them. He travelled without the great baggage
of bitterness adhering to most of the region’s tyrants and politicians. The
West, in consequence, liked him. He was feted in America and Britain,
latterly even in Israel, in a fashion out of all proportion to his country’s
size. The powers would do anything for him except return his lost lands.
Hussein’s conduct of policy, says Shlaim, was instinctive and sometimes
impetuous. He waited upon events rather than pursuing a coherent long-term
strategy, and periodically risked huge gambles. He exploited the cold war to
extract money and support from Washington, at a time when most Arab nations
were embracing Moscow.
For years, he successfully and profitably dallied with oil-rich Saddam. In
1982, in one of the more surreal manifestations of the region’s shifting
relationships, the king obliged the Americans by himself couriering
satellite photographs of Iranian deployments to Baghdad. The US was alarmed
by the prospect of Iran winning its war with Iraq, and sought to give Iraqi
fortunes a boost.
The biggest mistake of Hussein’s reign was to join the Egyptians and Syrians
in their 1967 war with Israel. The Israelis were willing to leave Jordan
alone. But Hussein had signed a pact with Nasser, and even accepted an
Egyptian general’s command of his army. He calculated that the political
price of nonbelligerence would be intolerable – ostracism in the Arab world.
In truth, of course, the cost of sharing Nasser’s defeat proved far higher:
Jordan lost east Jerusalem and control of the West Bank.During the years
that followed, Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas achieved increasing dominance
in Jordan. They ignored its laws, carried arms in its streets and openly
defied Hussein’s army. They behaved more like occupiers than guests.
In September 1970, the king was driven to act. There were 10 days of bitter
fighting. I blush to remember filing a dispatch from Amman, suggesting that
Hussein’s fall must at last be imminent. In reality, his troops utterly
defeated the Palestinians, killing some 3,400. The Syrians, in particular,
never forgave Hussein this “betrayal of the Arab cause”. But he had
decisively asserted his authority, and once again defied the prophets of his
own doom.
Much of Shlaim’s book focuses on the extraordinary bilateral relationship
between the king and successive Israeli governments. If he was never quite
their friend, says the author, he was “the best of enemies”.
Among Israeli prime ministers, Hussein won the trust even of such hardliners
as Begin and Shamir. Only Bibi Netanyahu – in Shlaim’s phrase “that very
rare thing, a genuine charlatan” – incurred the king’s lasting enmity. In
September 1997, three years after a peace treaty was signed between Jordan
and Israel, Netanyahu personally ordered an attempt to assassinate Hamas’s
local leader in Amman by an injection of poison. The mission went
disastrously wrong, two Mossad agents were captured. Hussein was
understandably furious.
For the most part, however, posterity must be astonished not by the tensions
in Hussein’s relations with Israel, but by the continuing dialogue between
them. The king himself met almost a thousand times with Israeli ministers
and intermediaries, more often in secret than in public.
Here was the earnest of Hussein’s obsession with preserving his own regime. To
do this, he was willing to traffic with Israel, even while its governments
clung doggedly to Jerusalem and the West Bank. His own people were far more
hostile to their Jewish neighbours than he was himself.
The Israelis, perceiving all this, broadly supported his rule. In 1990, for
instance, the US was enraged by Jordan’s support for Iraq before the first
Gulf war. Washington cut off vital cash aid, and appeared close to severing
all relations with Hussein. Israeli premier Shamir intervened on the king’s
behalf, urging President Bush to recognise his contribution to stability in
the region.
Shlaim expresses deep sympathy for the rebuffs to which Hussein’s attempts to
promote a Middle East settlement were subjected. They were met, he says,
“with ignorance and indifference on the part of the top American
policy-makers and dishonesty and deviousness on the part of the Israeli
ones”. At intervals throughout his reign, the Israelis delivered smashing
cross-border attacks into Jordan which, as the author remarks, invariably
increased support for Palestinian terrorism.
The theme of Shlaim’s last book, The Iron Wall, was that Israel has throughout
its history too readily resorted to military force, and been unwilling to
engage in meaningful diplomacy: “From 1967 Israel had ample opportunities to
trade land for peace in accordance with UN resolution 242.” Shlaim starts
this book with the controversial assertion that the 1917 Balfour Declaration
was one of the worst mistakes in British foreign policy, and “involved a
monumental injustice to the Palestinian Arabs”. It is worth recording this
line, to emphasise where the author is coming from. His narrative of
Israel’s dealings with Hussein suggests that the Jordanian ruler almost
always kept his word, while successive Jerusalem governments toyed with him.
The king deserves to be remembered with affection in the West, because he was
a decent human being. In 1997, when a deranged Jordanian soldier shot and
killed seven Israeli schoolgirls, Hussein travelled to their community of
Beit Shemesh. He fell on his knees beside the bereaved families in a gesture
of shared grief which caught the imaginations of millions of Israelis.
His death from cancer in January 1999 was greeted with real sorrow in his own
country, in Israel, and in the West. It is striking that, since his death,
Jordan is no longer perceived as a significant influence on the destinies of
the region. For almost half a century, Hussein’s slight figure managed to
punch far above his nation’s weight.
When he was gone, his son and successor, King Abdullah, could not match his
act. For Hussein, survivor seems a more appropriate appellation than lion.
But the preservation of his own throne was an astonishing achievement.
Shlaim tells the story extremely well, though from a perspective that will
win him few enthusiastic readers in Jerusalem.
Friends in the wrong places
One of the most controversial aspects of King Hussein’s reign was his
friendship with Saddam Hussein. There were sound strategic reasons for a
Jordanian alliance with Iraq in the 1980s – as a counterweight to Israel and
Iran, and as a source of oil and exports – but the relationship between the
two heads of state went much further. Saddam treated Hussein with
extravagant affection, calling him “Abu Abdullah”, or “father of Abdullah”,
and Hussein reciprocated with an extraordinary 61 visits in 10 years. The
price Hussein eventually paid for his friendship, though, was high. Although
he claimed not to have known in advance about Saddam’s 1990 invasion of
Kuwait, the western press vilified him, and the UN imposed crippling
sanctions in 1990-91 of $5 billion, which was nearly $1 billion more than
Jordan’s entire GDP for 1990.
Read on... websites:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1265315.ece
The Times obituary of King Hussein
LION OF JORDAN: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace by Avi Shlaim
Allen Lane £30 pp720
