Jihad in Jordan

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The deadly attacks yesterday on three American hotels in Amman, Jordan – the Grand Hyatt, the Radisson SAS, and a Days Inn – raise the stakes in the war against Islamic extremist terrorism. It is not only a terrible carnage against innocent individuals by a savage enemy, but it brings death and destruction to the capital of a country that has made, at least on the face of it, peace with Israel and whose monarch has sought to turn what the diplomats like to call a moderate face to America and the West. One is tempted to say, “We’re all moderates now.”


It needs to be said, nonetheless, that Jordan hasn’t always been what it has wanted us to think it was. These columns have been warning for years about the weakness of the current leadership of the Hashemite Kingdom, beginning back on August 5, 2002, with an editorial that ran under the headline “Who Lost Jordan?” The editorial spoke of the history of close relations between the Hashemite Kingdom and the Central Intelligence Agency and suggested that the Senate might profitably devote some time to an oversight hearing on the matter of “Who Lost Jordan?”


More recently, and prophetically, our columnist Nibras Kazimi wired a dispatch from Amman for the December 9, 2004, New York Sun: “All is not well in the Kingdom of Jordan. The sudden change in the line of succession for the Hashemite throne of the Kingdom of Jordan is a troubling sign that this oasis of stability in the Middle East may be about to pop a geyser.” As far back as 1999, David Wurmser, a shrewd analyst who is now a Bush administration foreign policy aide, warned in a dispatch of the Middle East Media Research Institute that the Clinton administration, with the involvement of the then-intelligence chief of Jordan, Samih al-Batikhi, was botching plans for the succession after King Hussein.


Jordan has its strategic problems, surrounded, as it is, by hostile Saudis to the South, Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank, and Syrians to the North. The current king, Deerfield-educated Abdullah II, while less skilled than his father or than his uncle Hassan, has at times shown good intentions as an ally of the West. We learned from Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel of America, one of the rabbis who met with the king last month, that Abdullah II recently canceled a virulently anti-Semitic television series that had been scheduled by a Jordanian satellite network to air during Ramadan. The king has maintained a peace with Israel. But until America works with the forces of freedom and democracy to create change for the better in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the West Bank, Jordan will be a dangerous place.


There’s discussion in some policy circles of writing off Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy entirely and letting the Palestinian Arabs take over. In the 1990s, Israel undercut the Hashemites by giving the Palestine Liberation Organization, rather than the Hashemites, who are descendants of the prophet Mohammad, control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Israel’s Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The days of rulers-for-life are waning across the world. We don’t have a big stake in the perpetuation of the Hashemite monarchy – our own preference would be Israeli rule on both sides of the Jordan, as Vladimir Jabotinsky suggested and as obtained in biblical times.


But the Jordanian monarchy isn’t particularly high up on our list of regimes that need changing, either; as far as rulers-for-life go, the Jordanian kings have been more benevolent than the Saudis or the Assads of Syria or Yasser Arafat or Mubarak in Egypt or Khamenei in Iran. If America and Israel want a king in Jordan and a friendly one, they will need to manage the rest of the region in a way that makes it possible for him to survive.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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