Jordan: U.S.'s Last Chance?

By Phebe Marr

The U.S. has long taken Jordan for granted. Both Congress and the executive branch have assumed that Jordan's stability depends on the West, and that King Hussein should fall into line with U.S. policy initiatives. However, recent interviews in Amman with senior Jordanian policymakers indicate that this assumption is dangerously out of date.

The peace process in the Middle East has been temporarily sidetracked, but the bombing of the U.S. embassy annex in Lebanon last September is a grim reminder that it must come to the fore very shortly. Jordan is critical to any new peace initiative. What, then, must the U.S. do to get Jordan to the conference table?

Jordanian officials say that if the U.S. wants Jordan's participation the Reagan Administration will have to play an active, not a passive, role in supporting U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. "Jordan wants implementation of 242," Information Minister Laila Sharaf stated, "not reconsideration of its principles." Foremost of these was an affirmation that Israel should withdraw from the territories it captured during the 1967 war, in return for peace within "secure and recognized" boundaries. Adnan Abu Odeh, Minister of the Hashimite Court and Advisor to the King, made a similar point: "We say full withdrawal (from occupied territory) for a comprehensive peace."

"For ten years...the Jordanian government had been willing to let the U.S. choose whatever means it wished to convince the Israelis to return territory for peace—all to no avail."

According to Foreign Minister Tahir al-Masri, Jordan has accepted the Reagan plan of September, 1982—which incorporates Resolution 242—and will hold the U.S. to its commitment to Arab sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. He adds that Jerusalem can be a united city with access by all faiths to the holy places, but that East Jerusalem must be under Arab sovereignty.

However, Jordanian officials are not sanguine about achieving these goals. King Hussein, like other Arab leaders, has lost confidence in American ability to play a constructive role in the Middle East. For ten years, the Foreign Minister pointed out, the Jordanian government had been willing to let the U.S. choose whatever means it wished to convince the Israelis to return territory for peace—all to no avail. In the meantime, the Jordanian public had become frustrated by U.S. inaction and seemed less confident than the government that the U.S. ultimately would bring aboutpeace. Finally, last March 13, King Hussein came around to accepting the public assessment. In an interview with New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the King said that because of its one-sided support for Israel the U.S. had destroyed its credibility as a mediator in the dispute. Advisor Abu Odeh considers this interview no mere pique, but rather a watershed in U.S.-Jordanian relations.

While this crisis of confidence is due in part to the collapse of U.S. policy in Lebanon, it is also the result of a series of less well publicized U.S. failures in U.S.-Jordan relations.

In September, 1982, when President Reagan put forth his peace initiative based on the creation of a West Bank entity in association with Jordan, Jordan accepted the plan. Israel flatly rejected it, and there has been virtually no movement since.
To support the initiative, King Hussein and President Reagan privately agreed that the King would seek to convince the PLO to entrust him with the negotiations, and that the President would convince the Israelis to freeze further Jewish settlement activities on the West Bank. Neither was successful. Jordanians feel strongly, however, that had Reagan applied pressure to stop the settlement activity, King Hussein could have used that evidence of U.S. seriousness of purpose to convince Arafat.
In March, 1984, President Reagan declined to help King Hussein on two foreign policy problems directly related to the Reagan initiative. First, Washington rejected a request by the King not to veto a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in occupied territories as illegal. Second, the President refused to put pressure on Israel to allow several moderate Palestinians to leave the West Bank to attend a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Amman.

"The U.S. should reassure Jordan that this time there will be no 'separate' peace, as in Camp David."

Congress's handling of Jordan's arms requests has been another irritant to U.S.-Jordan relations. According to Foreign Minister al-Masri, Jordan asks only for defensive weapons but must wait years for a reply. He complained that earlier this year Congress tried to tie Jordan's aid package to its willingness to negotiate on the basis of the Camp David agreement. When the condition became publicly known, it was quite embarrassing to Jordan.

Many diplomatic observers have been optimistic about Jordan's restoration of diplomatic relations with Egypt, regarding it as a first step toward negotiations with Israel. This optimism may be misplaced. In fact, the Jordanian step may have been designed as a defensive mechanism to protect against the rising tide of militancy in neighboring Syria and Lebanon. Jordan needs to develop a moderate constituency in the Arab world, including the PLO and Iraq, to help fend off future instability in the likely event of continued Israeli intransigence and a stalemate on the Arab-Israeli front. While there is little doubt that such a coalition of moderates would enable Jordan to negotiate should the Reagan initiative reemerge in the days ahead, the U.S. must take firm steps to restore Jordan's confidence in American reliability if this is to occur. Moreover, the U. S. should reassure Jordan that this time there will be no "separate" peace, as in Camp David. Jordan, backed by Egypt, and possibly Iraq, intends to make the U.S. live up to its promises.

To get around the current stalemate, Jordan is calling for an international conference under U.N. auspices to include the members of the Security Council and the parties to the dispute. This would put the major West European powers, the U.S.S.R., and the PLO in the picture. A main purpose behind this strategy seems to be to reduce the level of U.S. influence, seen as almost wholly favorable to Israel.

While negotiations with Jordan and the Arabs will not be easy, the U.S. should have no illusions about the price it will have to pay for failure to achieve a broad Arab-Israeli settlement. All Jordanian observers agree that a continued stalemate will produce more extremism, especially of the Muslim fundamentalist variety. A bi-election last March for eight vacant seats in the Jordanian Lower House—the first national election since 1967—resulted in a thumping victory for three Islamic fundamentalist candidates, while fundamentalist influence, backed by the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, is growing among youth in secondary schools and colleges.

Jordan also fears that the U.S. and Israel will deal with the Lebanese problem at the expense of both Jordan and the Palestinians. Jordanians are asking whether the price for an Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon will be an annexation of the West Bank, just as the price of withdrawal from the Sinai turned out to be the occupation of south Lebanon. Israel is building several new refugee camps in the Jordan Valley only two or three kilometers from the border, a factor which, according to the Foreign Minister, would make it easier to push Palestinians over the frontier in the event of a "crisis," or war. The consequences for Jordan of having to absorb more embittered Palestinians who have no hope of returning to their land would be grim, and could put the King's regime in jeopardy. It is also clear that a continued stalemate would bring a harvest of bitter anti-American sentiment.

There is still a chance for negotiations in Amman if the U.S. has the patience, the acumen, and the political will to conduct them. But the attitude of officials in Amman has shifted from cautious optimism to entrenched cynicism. If the U.S. really wants a settlement, it will have to convince a skeptical King that there is something to negotiate about.

Pbebe Marr is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a specialist on Middle East affairs.