Lion of Jordan (15 page)

The Qibya raid triggered serious civilian unrest inside Jordan and provoked street demonstrations on both the East and the West banks. There was a public explosion of anger at the government for its failure to protect the civilian population in the border area and to repel Israeli aggression. There were also manifestations of hostility towards Britain, whose reliability as an ally was loudly called into question. Opposition parties went on the offensive in parliament, with one group of deputies issuing calls to court martial Glubb, to dismiss the army's entire British officer corps and to tear up the Anglo-Jordanian defence treaty. One charge against the British officers was that they failed to dispatch an Arab Legion unit posted near by to the rescue of Qibya. Another was that they kept the legion short of ammunition.

Hussein was also dissatisfied with the British officers' performance. His source of information was Natheer al-Rasheed, a young man from the town of Salt and a member of the Movement of Free Jordanian Officers. At the time of the attack on Qibya, Rasheed was commanding an anti-tank unit on the West Bank. His unit indeed did not have adequate stocks of ammunition, and Rasheed did not think much of the British plans for the defence of the border area. Rasheed contacted the king, who received him in the royal palace, along with one of his ADCs, to hear what he had to say. The following day Hussein went to the army headquarters to call on Glubb. The officer in charge of army ammunition was at the meeting. This officer, who was also from Salt, told Rasheed that the king gave Glubb ‘a very hard time' over the amount of ammunition supplied by Britain to the army.
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The British commander in the West Bank and the local battalion commander were dismissed immediately after the meeting.

The consequences of the Qibya massacre reflected the growth of nationalism in Jordan. Fawzi Mulki distanced himself from Britain and moved closer to the Arab states. He underlined the gravity of the Israeli threat to Jordan to the Political Committee of the Arab League, which met in Amman on 21 October and responded by passing a series of resolutions to rebuild Qibya at the Arab League's expense, to supply arms and ammunition to the border villages, and to make a contribution of £2 million to the Jordanian National Guard. These commitments
were not wholly fulfilled, but by creating the illusion of an ‘Arab option', they added weight to the opposition's case for cutting off all connections with the British and thereby increased the pressure on Hussein to do so.
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Qibya was the first, indirect encounter between Hussein and Sharon. It was followed by many more, both direct and indirect, none of them amicable. It was also a landmark in the making of the king. After Qibya, Hussein became more a prime mover than an onlooker on the political stage. He began to inject himself more and more forcefully into the affairs of state, to meet alone with foreign diplomats and to move beyond the expression of opinions to the issuing of orders to his ministers. This more assertive style reflected growing personal self-confidence on the one hand and disillusion with parliamentary democracy on the other. Hussein later suggested that this early political experiment failed because he and Mulki tried to move too quickly. But it was not at all clear how Hussein himself envisioned the development of Jordanian institutions.
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Mulki was not a reliable instrument. Under his ministry ‘liberty turned into licence'.
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He was unable to control the press, parliament or even his own ministers. In May 1954 Hussein decided to dismiss him. As one scholar has observed, ‘That the protégé would finally sack the mentor was an important turning-point in Hussein's own political development.'
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By sacking Mulki, Hussein also put an end to the liberal experiment and reverted to the older style of Hashemite autocracy.

The hiring and firing of prime ministers was a habit that Hussein acquired early on in his reign. On becoming king he announced his opposition to frequent changes of government but his adherence to this principle was short-lived. Fawzi Mulki lasted only a year in power, from May 1953 to May 1954. His replacement, Tawfiq Abul Huda, also lasted a year, from May 1954 until May 1955. Thereafter the pace of change quickened, with three further cabinet reshuffles before the end of the year. Frequent changes of prime minister became a permanent feature of Hussein's reign. The choice of an individual to form a government was usually connected with a policy that the king wanted to pursue at the time. Thus, if the king wanted to promote better relations with Iraq, he would choose a candidate with pro-Iraqi credentials. Prime ministers were also used to serve a second purpose, that of ‘shock absorbers'. Dumping a prime minister was a way of dissociating the king from a policy that had become unpopular and of appeasing the public. Practice made the king more adept at playing this game. If there was a guiding principle, it was to protect the interests of the Hashemite dynasty.

Domestic politics were closely connected with regional politics. Everything in the Arab world was judged by the touchstone of Palestine and Israel, and it is on this that Jordan, or rather the Hashemite dynasty, was regarded with the greatest suspicion. The Hashemites were still seen as Britain's clients, planted in Jordan to divide the Arab world and to cooperate with the Zionists against the Palestinians. Abdullah was denounced as a traitor to the Arab cause and as a collaborator with the Jews. It was widely believed that the Hashemite family had abandoned the struggle for Palestine and that it might be willing to recognize the State of Israel in return for control over the territory to the east of Israel.
This was the prevalent view in the Arab world among the intellectuals as well as the masses. Jordan's efforts to rehabilitate the Palestinian refugees did nothing to allay these fears. Public opinion in the Arab world sided with the Palestinians in Jordan against the regime. Consequently, Hashemites were thrown on the defensive. What is more, because of the centrality of the Palestine question in Arab public discourse, the entire Jordanian political system became susceptible to propaganda and pressures from its neighbouring Arab states.

The year 1955 was a crucial one in the history of Jordan and of the Arab world. It was the year of the Baghdad Pact, a Western attempt to organize the Middle East into a defensive alliance to block Soviet advances. Jordan became the cockpit of two cold wars that were going on simultaneously: the global cold war between East and West, and the regional cold war between President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and his rivals.

The Baghdad Pact was the unofficial name for the defence treaty concluded between Iraq and Turkey on 24 February 1955. It had its origins in Western fears of Soviet aggression and was part of a global strategy of containment. It had been preceded by an agreement between Turkey and Pakistan, and by bilateral military aid agreements between the USA and these three countries. Britain, Pakistan and Iran joined the pact in 1955. America was expected to join but it changed its mind, leaving Britain in the lurch. Although America participated in a number of committees and provided most of the funding, it did not formally join the pact. The upshot was a rather odd organization that ended by dividing the Arab world. Basically, the pact pledged military aid in the event of communist aggression against a fellow member, but the organization had little military power, and, in any case, only two of its members bordered on the Soviet Union. For most of them the main incentive for joining was to curry favour with Britain and the United States. With Iraq as the only Arab member, the organization could not boast of a strong link to the Arab world. To remedy this deficiency, all the existing members embarked on a drive to recruit more Arab members. Jordan was a prime target both because of its close links with Britain and its dynastic links with Iraq.

Nuri as-Said, Iraq's perennial prime minister, argued forcefully for Arab participation in the Western-sponsored Pact of Mutual Cooperation. He was a staunch friend of Britain and an equally staunch enemy
of the Soviet Union. He viewed Zionism and communism as serious threats to the security of Iraq and the entire Arab world. But, like the rest of the Iraqi ruling elite, he regarded the Soviet threat as the greater and more immediate one. He ruled out Iraqi collaboration with the Soviets for fear that it would end in complete subordination to the Kremlin. Collaboration with the West, by contrast, was presented by Said as natural and in line with the covenant of the Arab League, provided agreement could be reached on the Suez base and Palestine issues.
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For Said the region's progress and destiny lay in close alliance with the West.

Gamal Abdel Nasser was the leading proponent of a purely Arab collective security scheme under the Arab League. For him, the real threat to the security of Egypt and the Arab world lay in Israel, not in the faraway Soviet Union. In world politics he preferred the Arab world to pursue, under Egypt's leadership, an independent, non-aligned policy between the Western and the Eastern blocs. When the Baghdad Pact was announced, Nasser regarded it as a conspiracy between Britain and Iraq, and as a betrayal of Arab interests by the Iraqi premier. Nasser immediately denounced the pact for introducing great power rivalries into the Middle East, dividing and weakening the Arabs, and threatening to encircle Egypt. It was, Nasser felt, a Western device designed to perpetuate colonial control over the Arab world just as the Arab world was asserting its independence and autonomy. On both the ideological and the political planes, the pact thus represented a challenge to Nasser's bid for Egyptian hegemony in the Arab world. He therefore unleashed a violent propaganda campaign over the airwaves against Iraq and Nuri as-Said. The Egyptian radio station Sawt al-Arab, ‘The Voice of the Arabs', relentlessly pilloried Said as a traitor to the Arab cause and as the cat's-paw of Western imperialism. The war of words between Cairo and Baghdad went on for a few weeks and then died down.

In the spring Nasser and Sir Anthony Eden, who had recently succeeded Winston Churchill as prime minister, seemed to have reached an understanding through their ambassadors that Britain would not try to recruit additional Arab members to the pact, and, in return, Egypt would desist from propaganda against the pact in general and against Iraq in particular.
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Sir Humphrey Trevelyan confirmed in his memoirs that his predecessor as ambassador to Cairo, on instructions from London, assured Nasser that no attempt would be made to secure the adherence
to the pact of other Arab states. Nasser replied that he would not regard it as action hostile to Egyptian interests if other non-Arab states should join the initial members. As a result of this understanding, there was a lull in the war of words until the autumn.
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Egypt was not alone in opposing Arab participation in the pact. Saudi Arabia also took the line that Arab defence should be based on the Arab League Security Pact, which excluded membership of Western military organizations. It was therefore opposed to members of the Arab League joining the pact. There were other reasons as well. Saudi Arabia was on bad terms with Britain in the mid 1950s because it opposed Saudi claims with regard to border disputes, notably over the Buraimi Oasis. King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud was therefore particularly opposed to Western defence plans that included his traditional rivals, the Hashemite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan. He even perceived the pact as a threat to the existence of his kingdom, and this led him to join Egypt, a curious ideological bedfellow, in the struggle to prevent Jordan from joining the pact.
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Jordan's attitude towards the two emergent groups was described by the British ambassador as disappointingly timorous and indecisive:

Such was the preoccupation of the Jordan Government with the Palestine problem and Israel, and their unwillingness to take a definite line or to take any steps to educate and direct Jordan towards what they privately admitted was the best course for the country, that
faute de mieux
Jordan got caught up in the dangerous current of Arab neutrality. When the Iraqi–Turkish Treaty, which afterwards grew into the Baghdad Pact, was first announced, Jordan came dangerously near to toppling into the Egyptian camp. After recovering some degree of balance, however, when the dangers of that course were pointed out to them the Jordan Government adopted a policy of neutrality between Iraq and Egypt and claimed to be attempting to reconcile the two groups in the name of ‘Arab unity'. Jordan's colours were firmly nailed to the fence.
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Hussein's initial instinct was to side with Nasser. He favoured the concept of ‘a northern tier' of defence against communist pressures. But, as he put it in his memoirs, ‘there was not much point in having a northern tier if people could step over it and build behind it.'
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Like Nasser, he believed in an autonomous Arab collective security pact, and, again like Nasser, he thought that the Baghdad Pact made no strategic sense because it was directed against the Soviet Union, whereas what
the Arabs needed was a collective counterweight to Israel. With its policy of hard-hitting military reprisals against its Arab neighbours, Israel posed a problem to which the pact provided no answer. The cabinet headed by Tawfiq Abul Huda adopted a neutral position and lent its support to the king's efforts to help Egypt and Iraq come to a better understanding.

On 14 February 1955 Hussein made a visit to Baghdad, followed by another to Cairo. Iraqi–Jordanian rivalry is the unwritten part of the story of the struggle over the Baghdad Pact. Because of their common Hashemite dynasty, Radio Cairo increasingly linked the two countries in its attacks. ‘In fact,' wrote Hussein in his memoirs, ‘Jordan and Iraq did not always see eye to eye. The Iraqi policy-making group considered themselves superior and rarely discussed matters with us.'
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Prince Talal, Hussein's nephew, was frank about the awkward relations between the two branches of the family: