Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [34]
Although a civilian career has many strengths, some things you get only through serving in the military. If I had been a lawyer in Amman, I would have had a very different perspective of the conflict. But here I was, an army officer observing helicopter missions protecting neutral shipping. It gave me an up close and personal understanding of regional power struggles that would prove to be increasingly useful in the years to come.
I spent three days on the frigate USS Elrod. Although I was well looked after, bunking in the captain’s quarters, it did not make me want to join the navy. After three days, I transferred to a large barge called the Hercules, which was bustling with action. It was interesting to see so many different branches of the military—U.S. Delta Force teams, Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land teams), and regular soldiers, sailors, and airmen—all working seamlessly together. The experience helped shape my enthusiasm later for creating our own Special Operations Command in Jordan.
Not long after that, in January 1990 and almost a year after I was promoted to the rank of major in February 1989, I returned to England for further military training. I spent nearly a year attending Staff College. It was next to Sandhurst, and as I drove through the ornate gates I remembered my time as a cadet, and my old color sergeant predicting that none of us would ever see the inside of the place. His taunt had worked.
As part of our introduction to international politics, we were scheduled to go on a trip to East Berlin, which was canceled at the last minute because of the dramatic changes then taking place. The previous November my fellow students and I had watched in amazement as the Berlin Wall fell and the old world order we had known was swept away. The confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union had divided the globe into two competing blocs. Old certainties would all too soon be replaced with new, shifting alliances.
In the Middle East, countries that had long looked to the Soviet Union as a patron were slow to adjust to a changed world, one in which there was now only one superpower. Opportunists and predators began to make different calculations about war and peace than when the region was divided into Soviet and Western spheres, and a small flashpoint could trigger a global conflict. What none of us at Staff College knew was how soon we would have to confront the new dangers of a changed world.
Chapter 8
“You Guys Don’t Stand a Chance”
On my return from Camberley Staff College in October 1990, I rejoined the Jordanian army and became the representative of the armored corps in the office of the Inspector General. It was my job to ensure that there were common standards of training and equipment across all sectors of the Jordanian military. After Staff College, you are expected to serve at headquarters in a staff posting for at least a year, so I was posted to Amman.
Two months earlier, Iraq had invaded Kuwait. It was a terrible time for all of Iraq’s neighbors. We share a long border with Iraq to the east, and we had to wonder whether Saddam Hussein would stop with Kuwait. My father was shocked at Saddam’s action and had a tremendous sense of foreboding. As bad as the invasion was, he felt it was the beginning of something much worse. I was with my father at the offices of the Royal Court, known as the Diwan, the day after the invasion. We listened together to the first reports of the Iraqi incursion.
That fall, Saddam Hussein became public enemy number one in the United States. But he had not always been regarded as a villain. A few years earlier he had been viewed as an ally against Iran. Although my father was no friend of Saddam, he had developed a close relationship with him in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, when Jordan was a transit point for Western weapons