Lion of Jordan (75 page)

High-level contacts with Israel were resumed when discord grew between Jordan and the PLO. Hussein had a secret meeting with Itzhak Rabin near Strasbourg in France in March 1986. The last time they had met was in 1977 when Rabin was prime minister. Now he was minister of defence with responsibility for the occupied territories. Rabin expressed his concern about the increase in PLO guerrilla activity and asked Hussein to curb the PLO leaders who lived in Jordan. Hussein said he had no intention of allowing the PLO to step up their attacks on Israel, and asked for Israel's help in strengthening the economic and institutional links between the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Jordanian government. Soon after his return home Hussein ordered the closing down of the PLO offices in Amman and the expulsion of Khalil al-Wazir, the PLO chief of operations and Arafat's deputy. These measures raised tension between Jordan and the PLO to new heights, and they did nothing to enhance Hussein's popular appeal. A poll conducted by the East Jerusalem paper
Al-Fajr
indicated that Hussein had lost favour among the West Bank Palestinians: 93.5 per cent regarded the PLO as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people' 77.9 per cent supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state; 1 per cent supported a link with Jordan; and 60 per cent called for continuation of the ‘armed struggle' against Israel.
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The erosion of Hussein's constituency on the West Bank made him more dependent on Israel. Coordination with the Israeli officials became more frequent and more detailed. Rabin and Peres paid a clandestine visit to Hussein at his holiday house in Aqaba in July. This was the house that George Shultz had liked so much. It was a short distance by speedboat from Eilat to Hussein's private wharf in the Gulf of Aqaba. Rabin and Peres were accompanied by Chief of Staff Moshe Levy and Hussein by Zaid Rifa'i. The talks went on for more than four hours, and it was well past midnight when the Israelis set off on their journey back home. The question of an international peace conference inevitably came up for discussion. Peres said that he would continue to work on this after he stepped down to become foreign minister and that Rabin would also represent an element of continuity in the Israeli team.

Hussein agreed with the Israelis that there was no sense in waiting for
the PLO to adopt a single unified and realistic stance. He said that he would continue to cultivate moderate leaders from the occupied territories as an alternative to the PLO. The discussion then turned to Jordan's West Bank Development Plan. The Israelis promised to use their influences in Washington, but the American response was disappointing. Jordan was looking for $1.5 billion over the five years of the plan but Congress had allocated only $90 million. The Israelis reaffirmed their policy of providing economic incentives and encouragement to the pro-Jordanian elements on the West Bank. This policy was publicly stated by Rabin in an interview to a newspaper in September: ‘The policy of Israel is to strengthen the position of Jordan in Judea and Samaria and to strike at the PLO.'
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The use of the Hebrew terminology was rather revealing. It suggested that Israel, like the PLO, was not about to surrender its own claim to the West Bank.

Another aspect of Israeli policy, which deeply troubled Hussein when he found out about it, was the supply of arms to Iran. Hussein saw Iran as a threat not only to Iraq but to the entire Arab world. He was therefore totally committed to Iraq, and assiduously cultivated Arab and Western support for it in its war against Iran. Israel, on the other hand, had a stake in prolonging the Iran–Iraq War: the Khomeini regime in Tehran and the Ba'th regime in Baghdad were both supporters of the PLO, and it suited Israel that they were at war with one another. Israel's interest was believed to be best served by a long and inconclusive war that weakened the two sides. Henry Kissinger once said that America wanted both sides to lose the Iran-Iraq War, and the same was true of Israel. In the spring of 1985 Israel secretly began to sell American-made weapons to Iran. It subsequently involved the Reagan administration itself in the sordid swap of arms to the Khomeini regime for the release of American hostages held by Islamic militants in Lebanon. The Israelis also suggested the spurious strategic guise in which this idea was dressed up, namely, that by supplying modest amounts of arms, America would help the moderates prevail against the radicals in the Khomeini regime and then win back Iran for the West. Soon the scandal was given a name by the American media: Irangate.

The damage from Irangate was serious. As George Shultz noted:

We have assaulted our own Middle East policy. The Arabs counted on us to play a strong and responsible role to contain and eventually bring the Gulf War to an
end. Now we are seen to be aiding the most radical forces in the region. We have acted directly counter to our own major effort to dry up the war by denying the weapons needed to continue it. The Jordanians – and other moderate Arabs – are appalled at what we have done.
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The revelation that America was actually arming Iran against Iraq outraged Hussein. The additional news that Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council was supplying Iran with US intelligence in the ongoing war against Iraq was equally disturbing, as Iran had just scored a major victory in the Fao Peninsula in February 1986. Against this backdrop came the news that the Reagan administration was postponing indefinitely the sale of weapons to Jordan. Small wonder that Hussein's mood grew more and more sombre.
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In a letter to the Reagan administration towards the end of the year, Hussein said that he failed to see how its arms shipments to Iran constituted neutrality. He was convinced that these weapons prolonged the war, strengthened the pro-war faction in the Iranian government and encouraged more hostage-taking. He warned that American actions offered the Soviets an opening to expand their regional influence.
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Unlike the Americans, Hussein was completely consistent and unswerving in his support for Iraq. At the personal level the close working relationship between the king and Saddam Hussein developed into a genuine friendship. This was obvious from the way they talked to one another in the company of others. Saddam treated Hussein with great respect and evident affection, calling him ‘Abu Abdullah', or ‘father of Abdullah'. The two leaders also trusted one another. This helped them to reach a level of mutual understanding and strategic cooperation beyond what was normal in inter-Arab relations.
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So close was the relationship that the years 1980–90 might be described as the Iraqi decade in Jordanian foreign relations. During this time Hussein visited Baghdad sixty-one times. Important issues did not arise on every occasion, but the king chose to go to Baghdad to sustain the friendship with Saddam and to show solidarity with the Iraqi people.

During the first eight years of the decade, when the Iran–Iraq War was going on, the pattern of these meetings did not change much. Hussein would go to Baghdad with a retinue of aides and advisers. The two delegations would meet in a conference room. Iraqi officers would give a briefing on the war with Iran, including a report from the battle field.
Saddam would add a few comments of his own, saying that he remained confident they were doing the right thing and that they had a solution to all the problems. His subordinates never contradicted him. Hussein would follow up with his own evaluation of regional and international developments. The two leaders would then go into a room on their own for a private conversation without any aides or note-takers. Hussein rarely told his people what transpired at these face-to-face meetings, but some of the issues they discussed were clearly highly sensitive. Saddam, for example, used the king to pass information and messages to many countries, including America and Britain.
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Throughout the 1980s America and Britain used Hussein and his generals to arm Saddam Hussein covertly. The Jordanian monarch not only provided facilities for transferring arms for Iraq; he also acted as a lobbyist for Saddam's unsavoury regime in the West. In March 1982 Hussein seized on intelligence reports to Washington, suggesting that the Iraqi Army was in serious trouble militarily, to urge swift action to forestall the possibility of its defeat at the hands of Iran. Jordan was the perfect front for covert American operations, whether they involved intelligence sharing or the supply of arms: Jordan had a long and open border with Iraq, and arms shipments could arrive by way of the Red Sea to the port of Aqaba and from there travel overland to Baghdad. Jordan's pro-Iraqi generals, supine bureaucracy and corrupt army of middlemen also made it the ideal staging ground for arms trafficking. The CIA station in Amman played a part in promoting these clandestine arms shipments to Baghdad. In June 1982, when an Iranian victory seemed imminent, the White House was persuaded to share some of America's most sensitive photographic intelligence with Saddam. The person chosen to hand-carry the satellite photographs to Baghdad was no spy, no courier and no special agent, but the Jordanian monarch himself. Later, as intelligence sharing became more frequent, arrangements were made for trusted Iraqi agents to pick up the sensitive data in Amman.
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The financial rewards of the alliance with Iraq were very considerable for Jordan's business community, as well as for the king personally. The Iran–Iraq War ushered in a new era of close economic cooperation. Iraqi purchases of Jordanian products grew steadily throughout the 1980s. Jordanian exports to Iraq increased from $168 million in 1985 to $212.3 million in 1989. By the end of the decade the Iraqi market
accounted for nearly a quarter of all Jordanian exports.
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Iraq was a very wealthy oil-producing country, and Saddam was a very big spender. No figures are available on the financial support that Saddam extended to the king because this was treated as a private matter between them, but the sums involved were probably very large.
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Iraqi largesse helped to liberate the king from his financial dependence on the Gulf states. Hussein always felt uneasy about his relationship with some of the Gulf shaikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He felt that the rulers of these countries did not always treat him with the respect he deserved. For a proud man it could be a humiliating experience to have to go to these rulers again and again to beg for money for his country. The aid he received helped to keep Jordan afloat but was not sufficient to fund major development projects. Saddam, by contrast, always treated Hussein as an equal partner and as a valued friend, and the help he gave was on a much more generous scale.
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Throughout his reign Hussein prided himself on his Pan-Arabism and on his services to the cause of Arab unity. In the mid 1980s he made a dramatic but little-known attempt to heal the rift between his giant neighbours to the north, Iraq and Syria. The main purpose of this attempt was to bring to an end Syrian support for Iran and to rally the entire Arab world behind Iraq. In April 1986, after reaching his own rapprochement with President Asad, Hussein shuttled between Baghdad and Damascus in an effort to bring about a similar reconciliation between the rival Ba'th regimes. His efforts bore fruit, and he succeeded in persuading first Saddam and then Asad to meet secretly under his auspices in Jordan.

The meeting took place at the Jafar Air Base in the eastern desert near Ma'an. One of the little houses on the base was prepared for the occasion. The king went into the house with his guests and stayed with them for an hour and then withdrew to let them talk privately. Saddam Hussein and Asad worked continuously for eighteen hours with some breaks: Saddam would go for a walk round the base with his bodyguards; Asad would go to his chalet to sit down and talk with Abdel Halim Khaddam, his vice-president. The king was slightly worried that his guests were taking so long. Saddam told him afterwards that he had spoken for half an hour and that Asad had spoken for the other seventeen and a half hours. Asad was extremely shrewd and decisive but notoriously long-winded. When Saddam and Asad said they had finished,
Hussein rejoined them in the little house. They told him that the talks had failed to close the gap between them. Asad wanted the announcement of a union between Iraq and Syria before anything else could happen, and Saddam rejected this condition. Asad was uncompromising throughout and unrepentant about his support for Iran; Saddam struck the posture of an Arab nationalist. An Arab country like Syria, he said, should not help a non-Arab country against a fellow Arab country. The fact that Asad and Saddam were Ba'thists who subscribed to the same ideology made no real difference. Each was entrenched in his own worldview and each was single-minded in the pursuit of his own interests. The irony of this abortive exercise in peacemaking was that a Hashemite king had tried to mediate between two Ba'thists in the interests of Arab unity.
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After his break with the PLO, Hussein pursued a very assertive policy of building up support for his leadership of the Palestinian cause on the West Bank. In a speech at the opening of parliament on 1 November 1986, he stated that the Palestine question remained Jordan's central concern, and that the Jordanian and the Palestinian people would continue to swim together in the same historical current.
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Hussein also placed renewed emphasis on the now ageing idea of an international conference as a vehicle for solving the Palestine problem. A separate peace with Israel on the Camp David model was out of the question. A conference was needed in order to give negotiations with Israel international legitimacy and to base them on UN resolutions. As always, Hussein also needed some Arab cover for dealing directly with Israel, and the break with the PLO made it all the more necessary to coordinate his moves with Syria. The Syrians had had a phobia about bilateral deals ever since Sadat signed the Camp David Accords. They wanted an international conference in order to balance the weight of Israel and its superpower sponsor. The traditional Syrian position was that peace talks would be meaningful only when the Arabs achieved some sort of strategic parity with Israel, but that was at best a very distant prospect. For the time being an international conference provided them with an incentive to go along with Hussein's diplomatic efforts. The problem was not Syria but Israel, or rather the deep division within the national unity government between Likud and the Labour Party. In October 1986, as pre-arranged, Shamir and Peres swapped places: Shamir became prime minister and Peres stepped down to become foreign minister. Abba Eban aptly described the change as ‘ushering in the tunnel at the end of the light'.