Chapter 14
One thing that is not well understood in the West is the diversity of the Middle East. Even though the countries of Europe share a common religion and political structure, there are tremendous cultural and social differences between a Swede and a Greek, a German and a Spaniard. Even European countries that speak the same language, such as Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, have fiercely defended their cultural and historical identities. So it makes little sense to talk about a “European”; most citizens of Europe will define themselves by their national identity.
There is a similar level of diversity in the Middle East. A Moroccan is quite different from a Jordanian or a Yemeni. Even though most Arab countries share a common religion, Islam, and a common language, Arabic, there are important cultural and historical differences between them, and they are also home to significant religious minorities. The Egyptians trace their history back to the ancient civilization of the Pharaohs, while the Gulf states have a bedouin desert tradition. Turks and Iranians speak different languages and have their own histories and cultures. So it makes as little sense to make sweeping generalizations about all “Arabs” as it does with all “Europeans.”
Even though I had met my counterparts around the region with my father, no one was going to go easy on me just because I was my father’s son. I live in a tough neighborhood. And as the new King of Jordan, I was about to find out just how tough it really was. To the west were Palestine as well as Israel, the region’s only nuclear power. To the east was Baathist Iraq, ruled by Saddam Hussein, who had fought wars with two of his other neighbors and had a million men under arms. To the north was Syria, ruled by Hafez al-Assad, an astute leader who had been in office for around three decades. And to the south was Saudi Arabia, home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, where Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was assuming wider responsibilities due to the illness of his brother, King Fahd. Just over the horizon in Egypt was Hosni Mubarak, an experienced leader with whom my father had developed a strong friendship. And farther afield were Libya, the Gulf states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—and, across the Arabian Gulf, Iran. Many leaders of those countries had been in power for decades and would likely remain there for years to come. The presidents were often in office longer than the kings.
My father had known all of these leaders personally and, as one of the world’s longest-serving heads of state, many of their predecessors too. He had taught me that Jordan had to maintain a delicate balance in regional politics. Relations with our neighbors had sometimes been turbulent. A few of them during the 1950s and 1960s, when Arab nationalism was pervasive, had even tried to overthrow or assassinate my father. But all had come to pay their respects at his funeral and mourned his passing. Now I would have to form my own relationships with them. And from my father’s experience I knew it would be hard to predict when they would be supportive and when they would not.
One leader I knew I would not be too close to was Saddam Hussein. Once I became king, I had very little direct contact with him. I chose not to visit Baghdad, but Iraq was not so easily avoided. It continued to be a source of concern, as many in the international community were worried about the possibility that Iraq would again attack one of its neighbors and suspected that Saddam had restarted his biological and nuclear weapons programs.
Tensions between Baghdad and the United States had been building steadily in the last year of my father’s life. In September 1998 the Iraq Liberation Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress, stipulating, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” President Clinton signed the act into law on October 31, 1998, at which point “regime change” became official U.S. policy. The next day, Saddam threw the UN weapons inspectors out of the country. Six weeks later, Clinton launched four days of air strikes against Iraqi weapons facilities from carriers in the Arabian Gulf, with British forces also joining in the attack.
This was a period of intense domestic pressure for Clinton. Throughout 1998 his affair with a White House intern had been under investigation, and the president had been forced to testify before a grand jury. On the last day of the air strikes, December 19, he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for perjury. He was acquitted by the Senate the following February, but that did not signal the end of his woes.
The relentless legal assault on the U.S. president made my father furious. Whatever Clinton’s personal failings, my father knew him as a firm friend of Jordan and a strong supporter of the peace process, and it was his nature to always come to the defense of friends. My father was a great admirer of America’s democratic traditions, but on occasion he believed things could go too far. He thought the whole investigation into Clinton’s personal life was like a soap opera, and he was really upset that people were attacking the president in such a vicious way. I remember watching television with him at the Mayo Clinic when Ken Starr, who was leading the investigation, came on the news. My father blew up and forcefully expressed his disapproval of how Starr was handling the investigation. “If I ever met that man, I would give him a piece of my mind,” he burst out—and that was not all he said. I left Mayo that night pleased that his morale was high and he still had his fighting spirit.
One difference between politics in the Middle East and in Europe and America is its deeply personal nature. In the West, international affairs tend to be conducted through institutions and permanent cadres of civil servants who provide policy continuity as political leaders step on and off the stage. Personal relations tend to be less important than the correct set of talking points.
But in my part of the world, people like to get to know one another face-to-face. We pride ourselves on our culture of hospitality, which often means a lot of eating and socializing. In the West, it is perfectly acceptable to meet with a head of state for twenty minutes, conduct some business, and move on. But in the Arab world it is considered rude to visit for a short time. The appropriate way to host honored guests is to invite them to a grand dinner. The real work gets done in informal conversations after the dinner, not in official meetings.
I knew I would have to build personal relationships with my fellow Arab leaders. The centers of power in the Middle East are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq, due to their size and historical importance, and the Gulf countries, because of their wealth and influence. I would need to meet the leaders of all of these nations to establish good relations. So in late March 1999 I began a whirlwind tour of the region, stopping first in Egypt, where I met President Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt has for centuries been a major center of regional power due to its size, history, and religious institutions. Cairo is home to Al Azhar University, which at over a thousand years old is one of the world’s most ancient, and Egyptians fondly refer to their country in Arabic as um al dunya—“mother of the world.”
The Mubaraks have been family friends since the early 1980s, and I knew Hosni Mubarak and his son Gamal well. Mubarak was extremely warm when he greeted me. We talked about some of the challenges we were both facing, and in particular about the difficulty of providing jobs and opportunities for a young population facing terrible poverty and unemployment. Mubarak mentioned how much the region had suffered from Rabin’s assassination a few years earlier. Rabin had been prepared to make considerable sacrifices for peace, and we both reflected on how the entire Middle East would have benefited from his forceful determination to come to terms with the Palestinians. Looking across our borders into Israel, neither of us saw a leader with the strength to bring his countrymen along with him as Rabin could have done. The stalled peace process and how to reinvigorate it were, and would be in every other meeting we would later have, major items on our agenda. We talked about the need to push for a breakthrough that would put the region back on track toward a settlement on the basis of the two-state solution.
Not long after that, in early April, I paid a visit to King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and his brother Crown Prince Abdullah in Jeddah. Crown Prince Abdullah had assumed a great deal of responsibility for ruling Saudi Arabia in recent years due to King Fahd’s failing health. I first met Prince Abdullah in the late 1970s when, on holiday from Deerfield, I went with my father and Feisal to Taif, a mountain town that is the summer seat of the Saudi Royal Court. I sat next to him at a dinner and remember reflecting on the fact that this man, almost forty years older than me, and I shared the same name. He had been a crack shot and told me stories about putting out cigarettes with his pistol. He was also a keen rider and regaled me with accounts of his horses.
But although Crown Prince Abdullah and I had a good personal rapport, the relationship between Jordan and Saudi Arabia had historically been a delicate one. The Hashemite family originally came from the Hijaz and had ruled over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for more than seven hundred years, until 1925, when the Hashemites lost the area to Ibn Saud, who founded the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. My father’s relationship with the Saudis had been very strong, but it was damaged by the position he had taken in the Gulf War in 1991. Never one to let politics trump personal friendship, however, Crown Prince Abdullah visited my father at his house in Washington in the last months of his life and brought him Zamzam water, which comes from a well in the holy city of Mecca. He poured the water for him as a good omen, and also brought a copy of the Holy Quran, a gesture that deeply touched my father, who spoke of it more than once with warm appreciation in the days that followed.
I had been to Saudi Arabia several times during my days in Special Forces and had gotten to know some of the younger generation, including two of Crown Prince Abdullah’s sons, Mutaib and Abdulaziz. We had spoken about the historic clashes between our two families and how we should put history to one side and focus on strengthening our relationship.
Abdullah, who succeeded King Fahd in 2005, is a rare mix of traditional and modern leader. He is a leader with an instinctive understanding of what makes people tick in our region. With values firmly rooted in his country’s heritage and culture, he has a farreaching vision for the future of his people. Saudi Arabia is a conservative society that has traditionally enforced a strict segregation between men and women. But on September 5, 2009, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia’s first coeducational university, located on the Red Sea near Jeddah, opened its doors. And when a senior Saudi cleric criticized the coed nature of the university, King Abdullah removed him from his post. Under his reign, Saudi Arabia has witnessed tremendous development in education, telecommunications, and infrastructure. His policies have led to significant diversification of the economy and facilitated the growth of the private sector. King Abdullah initiated major reforms in the judicial system, restructuring courts and introducing a supreme court of justice to achieve uniformity in rulings. For the first time in the country’s history, a woman was appointed as a deputy minister in the cabinet.
King Abdullah is the kind of man it takes a while to get to know, but once you have built a relationship, it is generally very strong. He likes to watch the news while he eats, and it is a sign that you are an honored guest if he feels relaxed enough in your company to host you in a more informal setting with the TV on. He is a very gracious host, and at state dinners when I came to visit he would sometimes walk beside me, surveying the various traditional dishes of rice, lamb, and pastries, pause beside a particularly appetizing dish, taste it, then put a little on my plate. He has been a close friend, and a strong supporter of Jordan.
Later that month I went to Oman, where I met with Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al Said in the desert near Nizwa, a town some 120 miles southwest of the capital, Muscat. Every year, the sultan goes for a three-month tour through the different regions of Oman, accompanied by his government ministers. A fellow Sandhurst graduate, the sultan is a modest and meticulous man who is always immaculately groomed. He pays close attention to the way his country is run, and moved Oman from the twelfth to the twenty-first century without losing sight of its rich heritage as a seafaring country. (Tradition has it that Sinbad the Sailor was born in a small fishing village northwest of Muscat.)
The sultan of Oman has remarkably few enemies. A testament to his evenhandedness and diplomatic skill is his ability to stay on friendly terms with both the Iranians and the Americans. His relationship with my father was very strong, in part because my father sent Jordanian troops to help defeat the rebels who led an insurgency against him in the 1960s and 1970s. The Dhofar rebellion began as a protest against the rule of the sultan’s father, Said Bin Taimur, but by 1970, when the current sultan gained power, the rebels had embraced Marxism and were supported by China and the Soviet Union. The rebellion was finally defeated in 1975, and Sultan Qaboos began to modernize his country after that.
Focusing on education, the role of women, and political stability, he took pains to ensure that his country developed efficient institutions and was forward-looking. His government always has a five-year plan and Oman has set aside funds for the day its oil runs out. The sultan plays a discreet role on the world stage, but his standing in the region is extremely high. The Western leaders who know him always pay careful attention to his words. When my father passed away, one of the people who was most supportive and helpful to me was the sultan. He always gives wise advice and often has a completely original way of looking at a situation. In my early years as king especially, I benefited greatly from his counsel.
I continued on to the United Arab Emirates, meeting with Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the emir of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE. A traditional ruler, Sheikh Zayed, who by then was in his early eighties, had a disarming personal manner. He presided over Abu Dhabi’s and the rest of the UAE’s amazing transformation into one of the Arab world’s most modern countries, with vibrant business, cultural, and educational centers. When he died in 2004, the region lost a great leader, known for his wisdom, vision, and compassion. His successor, Sheikh Khalifa, has carried on his father’s tradition of ruling with tolerance and wisdom. Sheikh Zayed was very supportive of Jordan and was always there if I needed help. I am close friends with his son Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Next, I went to Sirte, a coastal town 250 miles east of Tripoli, in Libya, to meet Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. When he took power in a military coup in 1969, Qadhafi allied himself with various radical factions across the region. In 1982, he devised a plan to smuggle ground-to-air missiles into Jordan and to position them at the Amman and Aqaba airports to shoot down my father’s plane. The man entrusted by Qadhafi with carrying out the plot, the Libyan ambassador to Jordan, was horrified. Knowing he would be put in jail or worse if he refused, he pretended to carry out his orders. But as the day of the plot approached, he defected to Jordan and told my father about it.
The next year, to the astonishment of many Westerners, my father invited Colonel Qadhafi to come to Amman for a public reconciliation. On June 10, 1983, a jet plane landed at Amman’s military airport, and Qadhafi descended from the plane accompanied by a group of female bodyguards, young women wearing Cuban-style combat shorts with safari vests, sporting small peaked caps over afro hairdos, and carrying guns. After two hours of talks, my father invited Qadhafi to spend the night in Jordan before continuing on his journey to Syria. To an outsider, this might seem like an odd way to treat a man who the year before had tried to kill you. But my father always believed in keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies even closer.
He knew that the Middle East was a crowded neighborhood, and his three decades as king had taught him that today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s friend. There was no sense in bearing grudges. Like members of an extended family, the leaders of the twenty-two Arab countries were going to be dealing with one another for many years to come. Over time, my father and Qadhafi became closer, to the point where, when I was commander of Special Operations, he would send me to Libya to discuss military cooperation. On these trips I got to know Qadhafi’s sons.
My father took an equally enlightened approach in his handling of domestic opponents. Jordan is a small country, and he knew he would have to live with the people he disciplined and their families, too. The traditional punishment in the Middle East for plotting to overthrow a government is execution. But my father would often exile the people who plotted against him for a few years and then welcome them back to Jordan. He would sometimes even offer the returning plotter a job in government. It was his way of showing forgiveness and inspiring loyalty. The next time they might think twice before seeking to undermine the man who had shown them such kindness. I had learned much from watching my father lead our country, but I knew that with his passing I would have to find my own approach.
In late April I visited Syria. Relations between Syria and Jordan had been strained since my father had signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. Hafez al-Assad was furious that Jordan had not waited for him to conclude his own negotiations with the Israelis over the Golan Heights, which had been seized by the Israeli army in 1967. Assad would not visit Amman after the treaty until my father’s funeral. So my visit to Damascus was a chance to recalibrate relations.
I knew a little about Assad and what kind of man he was. In the late 1980s, when tensions between him and Saddam Hussein were running high—Saddam was entrenched in a lengthy, violent war with Iran, and Assad was siding with the Iranians—my father, working through back channels, persuaded the two men to meet, following Winston Churchill’s advice that “to jaw jaw is always better than to war war.” The site he chose was Al Jafr, a remote desert village about 140 miles south of Amman. At that time, I was a military officer flying Cobra helicopters and my unit was part of the aerial security. The Royal Guard cordoned off the meeting site, stationing armed troops along the perimeter and around the landing strip. We separated the compound into two halves, one side for the Syrians and the other for the Iraqis, and prepared accommodations.
Once preparations were completed, my father beckoned me to join him. “Stay with me and watch what happens,” he said. Looking back, I realize that he wanted me to have a glimpse into international diplomacy, a world far removed from my duties as an army officer.
Both Syria and Iraq were then ruled by the Baath Party, which espoused a form of secular Arab socialism. In the late 1960s, the Baath Party, which was formed in Syria, split. The party’s founders were driven into exile—moving to Iraq, where they soon drew a following and took over the government in 1968. Relations between Baathist Syria and Iraq fluctuated over the years between high tension and collaboration, and by the mid-1980s, when my father brought them together, these two strong military powers were jockeying for regional primacy.
Late in the afternoon of the appointed day, the sound of an aircraft engine floated across the desert, and then several jets with Syrian flags on their tails landed and taxied down the makeshift runway. Accompanied by around fifty soldiers carrying AK-47 assault rifles, Hafez al-Assad emerged from his plane. My father greeted him and escorted him and his delegation to the Syrian half of the compound.
About half an hour later several more planes landed, this time bearing Iraqi colors. Saddam Hussein marched out of the lead plane, accompanied by some fifty heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. My father welcomed Saddam and showed him to the Iraqi delegation’s area.
I watched the proceedings with Dr. Samir Farraj, my father’s personal physician. As dusk fell, our soldiers set up bright spotlights to illuminate the whole area like daylight. We did not want any confusion caused by shadows in the night.
Saddam and Assad went into the meeting room my father had prepared, while my father waited outside with the rest of us. Several hours passed, during which he kept sending in more coffee and food. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, the meeting ended. My father took Saddam to one side and asked how it had gone. Saddam wearily said that he had spoken for no more than fifteen minutes during the whole time. Relegating someone with Saddam’s massive ego almost entirely to listening was not a good idea. Despite all my father’s efforts, he could not persuade the two men to reconcile, and they left the desert meeting still on hostile terms. But both leaders respected my father’s attempt to act as a peacemaker. And I had learned a valuable lesson about the need for patience in diplomacy.
I had been invited to visit President Clinton in Washington in May, and when I saw President Assad in Damascus, he asked me to relay a message to Clinton. He said he was ready to talk to the Americans. I told him I would convey his message and we discussed the peace process and water rights. We also talked about his son, Bashar, whom I met on the visit. We got along well. Hafez al-Assad was nearing seventy, and I think he was excited by the prospect of his son and me becoming friends.
President Assad died unexpectedly just over a year after my visit and was succeeded by his son. Though Bashar and I do not agree on every aspect of regional politics, our countries are collaborating more than ever before. We consult on the peace process, and are expanding our cooperation in many areas, including regional energy projects. We are encouraging the private sectors to forge stronger links. Even our young children have established ties. When we first visited, all the children were very shy, but it didn’t take them long to discover a common interest in Super Mario Brothers—and now they get along well.
The last stop on my tour of the neighborhood was Gaza, where I had my first official meeting with Arafat in my role as king. Arafat had come to Amman for my father’s funeral, but we did not have any discussions then.
My father and Arafat had become closer toward the end of their lives. I would sometimes attend their meetings and my father would laugh, watching me standing helpless while Arafat showered me with kisses. By then, having won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994, he had taken on the role of elder statesman.
As we gathered for lunch, each accompanied by our respective delegations, Arafat said, “The Palestinian people of the West Bank and the East Bank welcome you to Gaza!” My people bristled, as Arafat was implying that he still retained some political influence in Jordan, the “East Bank,” invoking memories of his failed attempt to overthrow my father in 1970.
Arafat was also referring to the large number of Jordanians of Palestinian origin. He never gave up his claim to represent all Palestinians who had been chased from their homes in Israel or forced to flee during the wars. During and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, a wave of refugees from Palestine crossed into Jordan, significantly increasing Jordan’s then population of 433,000. These refugees were given Jordanian citizenship. A second wave of Palestinians crossed the River Jordan after the 1967 war—they already had Jordanian nationality as they mostly lived in the West Bank, which belonged to Jordan. In 1999, around 43 percent of Jordan’s population was of Palestinian origin.
I let his curious comment pass, but later, in a tête-à-tête, I spoke my mind. “The Palestinian people will always have 110 percent of my support in the search for a Palestinian state,” I said. “And once the Palestinians achieve their right to statehood, Jordanians of Palestinian origin will at last have the right to choose where they want to live. Those who want to be Palestinian citizens and move to Palestine will be free to do so, and all of our citizens who choose to stay in Jordan, whatever their background or origin, will remain Jordanian citizens. Their loyalty will be to the Jordanian flag, not the Palestinian, which for some is not the case today.”
I saw a flicker of a smile pass across the old freedom fighter’s lips. He had been testing my authority with his reference to the “East Bank,” and my vigorous response I think surprised him.
We moved from discussing inter-Arab politics to the attempt to revive the Wye Accords and the implications of Ehud Barak’s election as prime minister of Israel. Arafat and I both agreed that it was important for the Arabs to maintain a united front in any negotiations with the Israelis. We discussed the possibility that the new Israeli prime minister would try to split the Arabs by opening peace negotiations with Syria. Arafat, who was curious about my conversation with Assad, worried that the Syrian leader would respond positively to any overtures by the Israelis, at the expense of the Palestinians. I told him that I did not believe Assad would accept such a deal. I returned to Jordan curious to see whether Barak would live up to our hopes and expectations.