Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [112]
The next day the Iraqi ambassador came to see me. He was furious. “I’ve got a message from Saddam,” he said. “He’s really upset that you’ve done this.”
“I am quite willing to come out publicly and say that I’ve arrested these three people because they were plotting to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Jordanians,” I said. “I am looking beyond the war, Your Excellency. I don’t want to have to say anything now that would destroy the long-term relationship between Iraq and the Jordanian people. So please send this message back to Saddam: if this is how you want to do it, I will publicly reveal how your regime is trying to kill Jordanian civilians.” The ambassador—to his credit—came back to me and assured me that he had sent my message back to Baghdad. “Problem solved,” he said. The ambassador had told his Foreign Ministry that they had made a mess and that we would go public and cause an international incident if they continued to pursue it. So the issue died. We expelled the three men to Baghdad, and accusations from the Iraqi government stopped. At this point, they had more pressing concerns.
On March 28, after Friday prayers, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Jordan to protest the Iraq War. In Amman, a crowd of eight hundred people gathered near the Israeli embassy, chanting, “Our beloved Saddam, use your chemical weapons on the invaders!” They then tried to march on the embassy a few streets away, but the crowd was dispersed by Jordanian riot police, who fired live rounds over their heads.
Many of the demonstrators viewed the war as the West attacking the Arab and Muslim world, continuing a long history of violent Western interaction with our region. This perception had been strengthened when, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush referred to a “crusade” against terrorism. This unfortunate choice of words awakened in many Arabs memories of the violent invasions of the Middle Ages, and the Crusaders’ bloody seizure of Jerusalem. Now, hundreds of years later, a Western army had again entered an Arab land. Some also believed that the United States was acting under the influence of Israel to destroy a strong Arab country, while the more cynical suspected that it wanted to replace Iraq’s leader with somebody more friendly toward American oil companies.
Three days later a group of ninety-nine prominent Jordanians, including four former prime ministers, tried to ride this wave of public opinion and demanded that Jordan support Saddam in the war and do things I knew, and they knew, would not be in our national interests. However popular such rhetoric might be domestically, I did not have the luxury of making my decisions based on emotions. I had to look to the future and to Jordan’s national interests once the fighting stopped. From my knowledge of Iraqi and Western forces, I thought it would be a pretty one-sided fight and would be over quickly. But others in Jordan were less certain.
The U.S. and British forces had some quick military successes, taking the southern town of Basra a few days into the conflict. But then the media, especially Arab satellite TV channels, began to report that they were facing difficulties. Their analysis was so convincing, bringing in retired generals to analyze the war’s progress, that a lot of people, including many politicians, began to think the war would last a very long time, and even that Iraq had the upper hand. A week into the war, the U.S. advance on Baghdad was hampered by terrible dust storms. My wife had been watching television, which was reporting that the war was going badly for the Americans. But I knew that you did not get a good sense of a war from watching