Lion of Jordan (71 page)

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.
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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.
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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.

Hussein, for his part, increasingly looked to Iraq to offset the threat of an expansionist Israel. The alliance with Iraq compensated to some extent for Egypt's disengagement from the Arab–Israeli conflict. It gave Jordan strategic depth and acted as a deterrent to an Israeli attack. King Abdullah II has commented: ‘Iraq, as a counterbalance to Israel, would be a lot stronger than Syria or Saudi Arabia. It was a dividend of the relationship that was built in fighting Iran. The dividend of having a strong neighbour like Iraq allowed my father to have a much firmer position in dealing with the Israeli governments at the time.'
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Alignment with Baghdad was also relevant for diplomatic bargaining with Israel. As Prince Talal bin Muhammad has observed: ‘His Majesty saw Iraq as providing the Arabs with strategic parity with the Israelis to enable us to resume negotiations from a position of strength. He believed that the only thing that would break the deadlock would be Arab strategic parity with Israel. Israel would then be forced to come to the negotiating table. We would be able to negotiate from a position of equality rather than inferiority.'
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The prospects for breaking the diplomatic deadlock were not enhanced by the election of a Republican administration headed by Ronald Reagan in November 1980. Reagan was one of the most passionately pro-Israeli presidents in American history. In his memoirs Reagan wrote: ‘I've believed many things in my life, but no conviction I've ever held has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.'
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Like Nixon and Kissinger before him, Reagan also emphatically perceived world politics through the prism of his country's global rivalry with the Soviet Union. Israel for him was not only a beacon of freedom but a strategic asset in countering Soviet advances in the area. Initially, he was reluctant to get involved in the diplomacy of the Arab–Israeli conflict, although he did wish to cultivate good relations with moderate Arab rulers. With Hussein, Reagan quickly developed a warm personal relationship. He and his wife Nancy enjoyed the glamour that went with entertaining royalty, and Hussein was the first foreign leader to be invited to Washington on a state visit after Reagan was elected. Reagan said to Richard Viets, the American
ambassador to Amman, ‘That man is a straight shooter and I believe we can do business together.' The king subsequently began to realize that Reagan was not always on top of his brief, to put it mildly. Conversation between them often wandered off course.
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One major issue in American–Jordanian relations during Reagan's first term of office was the conflict in Lebanon. The traditional rivalry there between Muslims and Maronite Christians was accentuated by the arrival of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations after their expulsion from Jordan. Palestinian attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory further fuelled the cycle of violence by provoking Israeli reprisals. Jordan was not directly involved but Hussein felt all along that Lebanon should be stabilized and that it should not be used as a battlefield. Jordan's interest lay in containing the violence and in calming things down. Accordingly, Hussein used what influence he had to promote reconciliation among the various parties to the civil war but of course he had no influence over the PLO. On 14 March 1978, following a serious terrorist attack, Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied the south of the country between the border and the Litani River. The aim of ‘Operation Litani' was to destroy the PLO bases and to widen the buffer zone under the renegade Lebanese Army officer Major Saad Haddad, Israel's surrogate in southern Lebanon. The price the Lebanese paid for the incursion was 700 dead, scores of villages devastated, and the flight from the war zone of 225,000 civilians. There was no Arab military resistance to this incursion, and Hussein, in a nationwide speech, deplored what he called the atmosphere of lethargy and indifference that prevailed in the Arab world. He called on the Arab leaders to rise to their national responsibility and so stop the Arab nation from having to ‘see itself being eroded bit by bit, its limbs chopped off and its honour humiliated'.
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Hussein feared that Jordan could be just as vulnerable to Israeli aggression as southern Lebanon in the absence of united Arab action. On more than one occasion he referred to this first Israeli invasion as one of the most troubling moments in his career because if Israel did to Jordan what it had done to Lebanon, the Arab reaction would be the same: silence and impotence.
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Silence and impotence were the hallmarks of the Arab response to Israel's second invasion of Lebanon on 6 June 1982. The invasion was called ‘Operation Peace for Galilee' in an attempt to portray it as a defensive measure to stop PLO attacks. But it was an offensive war that
violated a year-long ceasefire brokered by the US. Menachem Begin was nominally in charge, but the real driving force behind the war was Ariel Sharon. From his first day at the defence ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the ‘Big Plan' for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The third was to expel the Syrian forces from Lebanon or at least to weaken seriously the Syrian presence there. In Sharon's big plan, the war in Lebanon was intended to transform the situation not only in Lebanon but in the whole Middle East.
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The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon and the West Bank into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would ease international pressure on Israel and give it a freer hand to determine the fate of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To his close friends Sharon disclosed that had he been prime minister he would have actively helped the Palestinians depose Hussein and establish a Palestinian state in Jordan. He said he would give Hussein twenty-four hours to get out of Amman, but he did not say what would happen if Hussein declined.
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Begin was not privy to all aspects of Sharon's ambitious geopolitical scenario, but they were united by their desire to act against the PLO in Lebanon.