Two weeks later, to mark the end of the forty-day mourning period for my father, some of my advisers suggested that we grant amnesty for certain prisoners, as was the tradition with the accession of a new ruler. I agreed, on condition that we not release anyone accused of a very serious crime, such as murder or rape. My advisers came up with a list of seven hundred people who, they said, had been very carefully vetted, and I gave my approval for their release. Both houses of Parliament voted to approve the amnesty, and a few days later the first of the prisoners walked free. One of them, Ahmed Fadil Khalayleh, a man now notoriously known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, should never have been allowed out of jail. I would later bitterly regret that his name was on the list.
Some leaders, such as Netanyahu and Arafat, had come to visit me. But others were waiting for me to visit them. It was a delicate time. My fellow Arab rulers had all known my father and my uncle, in many cases for decades, and I would have to work hard to earn their respect as a peer. Some had fought with my father, and even tried to kill him. In those instances, I could use the fact that I was new to the job to start over with a clean slate.
Chapter 14
Friends and Neighbors
O
ne 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.)