Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [73]
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