Jordan, location of Wednesday’s very lethal bombings at three hotels, is in many ways a highly improbable country. It was created in the post-WW-1 carve-up of that part of the previous Ottoman Empire– primarily to be given as a sort of “consolation prize” to a branch of the Hashemite family that had previously been offered thet part of western Saudi Arabia that contains the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina…
But wouldn’t you know it, the warrior-dynast Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud insisted on staying on in that part of the Arabian peninsula. Insisted it belonged to his family, not anyone else’s. (And certainly that it wasn’t for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to give it away to anyone else.). So the Hashemites were left to wander like Moses in the desert…
But not for very long. The Brits rapidly installed one Hashemite leader in “Transjordan”, as it was then called, and they tried to install another in Damascus. But the French weren’t having any of that, so that one was shuttled over and recycled into Iraq, instead…
You get the picture? Behind a rhetoric that intermittently talked about the need for the “self-determination” of local Arab populations– as against their earlier rule by Istanbul– the British Colonial Office chappies (and uber-chapette Gertrude Bell) were busy playing “musical kings” all around the region… “And when the music stops you all stay where you are.”
Layered onto that, of course, was the (gasp!) imperial rivalry between the British and French. Did you ever look at a “political map” of this region and wonder why (1) so many of the borders between the states there are perfectly straight lines, or (2) why there’s a funny squarish tab of “Jordan” that extends east-north-east a little bit, up to join Iraq? All that is the result of intense negotiations– between the British and the French. (Self-determination? Well, I guess it depends what the meaning of “self” is.)
As for that tab that links Jordan to Iraq, the explanation for that is quite simple. It’s called an oil pipeline. If you drive along that long, extremely boring desert road there you pass through places with the quaint “names” of H-2, H-3, H-4, etc… Pumping stations that became way-stations and then ragged little towns.
Well, in the late 1990s, the Project for a New American Century and other pro-Likud neocons started pushing for their own, more recent version of Middle Eastern “musical kings”. This was the approach sometimes known as “Everybody Move Over One” (see, e.g., here.) Under EMOO, Israel would get to keep the West Bank. The Palestinians– who have been squeezed very hard in the West Bank since 1967 and have long constituted a numerical majority in Jordan– would “get” Jordan. And the Hashemites would play another round of musical kings and “get” Iraq.
Except it hasn’t really worked out that way yet, has it? Instead, what we seem to be seeing in the region is the unfolding of an EMOO theory that– like all the indigenous writing systems of this region– moves from right to left, rather than left to right. The Iranians– who didn’t even really feature in EMOO-Mark 1– have majorly extended their influence westward into Iraq. That has squeezed the Sunni Arabs of Iraq… And now, using the network of linkages that’s always existed between western Iraq and Jordan, the chaos and violence from Iraq have been bleeding over into Jordan, too.
No, I am not saying that this means that in the near future the Palestinians will suddenly be able to push westward back against the Likud and establish their own power in the West Bank. But I do think we can draw a few broader and more general lessons from what has been happening:
- 1. Any use of violence has unpredictable human consequences— and the more major the violence used, the more unpredictable and long-lasting the aftershocks will be. Washington’s cavalier and very violent “move on the Middle Eastern chessboard” against Saddam had consequences that were unforeseen, literally unforeseeable, and have continued to this day to cause serious harm to the interests of the peoples of that region (and the US citizenry.)
2. National boundaries drawn in colonial times, by colonial hands, certainly had detrimental effects on the interests and lifestyles of the indigenous peoples. But over their decades in existence those boundaries acquired some coherence and legitimacy, even if only through force majeure. They allowed some predictability in governance and the possibility (if nowhere the reality) of the emergence of accountability in governance. All the pan-Arabist challenges to the Sykes-Picot boundaries failed. Current attempts to redraw the regional map– even if “only” through the emergence of quasi-independent statelets inside Iraq– will certainly ricochet throughout the whole region. This will bring the threat of violence and social breakdown to increasing circles of population throughout the region.
3. Jordan has always been a buffer state. Right now, it’s a very uneasy “buffer” between Israel and Iraq. It is a major conduit for the shipment of US war supplies into Iraq– whether these come into Jordan through Aqaba or through or from Israel… It is also the territory where population of the dispossessed and angry population of Palestine mixes with the dispossessed and angry population of western and central Iraq.
Jordan– like much of the rest of the region– feels to me like an explosion waiting to happen. So far, the King has acted with agility. Getting his supporters very visibly out on the streets of Amman yesterday, before the pro-Islamist people could get their people there, was a smart move. Zarqawi hurt himself badly– and quite possibly also damaged the anti-US cause more broadly– by the wanton and inhumane nature of Wednesday’s violence. (The counter-productive effect of the purveyors of terror on the building of genuine, mass-based social movements was ever thus.) So maybe the explosion has been staved off from Jordan for a little while?
Still, the whole region of the Middle East is now bubbling with different kinds of political energy. It hasn’t looked this volatile and unpredictable since 1970. That was the year when these things happened:
- (1) The Palestinian militants of George Habash’s PFLP tried and failed to topple the monarchy in Jordan. But they threw the whole country into chaos as they did so.
(2) Gamal Abdel-Nasser died of a heart attack– in the midst of trying to negotiate an end to the Palestinian-Jordanian battles in Jordan.
(3) Hafez al-Asad, then the commander of the Syrian Air Force and a relative moderate in the Syrian Baath Party, made the crucial decision not to use air power to support Syrian tanks going to aid the Palestinians in Jordan… That decision persuaded the Syrian tank commanders to turn back home; and shortly afterward Asad made the coup that brought his much less adventurous branch of the Baath to power in Damascus.
In 1969, Qadhafi had seized power in Libya and Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq… So 1969 and 1970 were really transformative years for the politics of the whole region. Jordan was a crucial locus and engine of much of that change.
Since 1970, as I’ve written before, the political systems of nearly all these polities became quite ossified. Thirty months ago, Washington took a sledgehammer to the Iraqi part of the region’s bone-set, and now, much of the ossification seems to be shattering. The whole Middle East will most likely see a lot of deep, rapid, and hard-to-predict change in the two years ahead. This much is easy to predict though: these changes will look nothing like the rosy scripts of spread of US-style democratization and US influence touted by the war-planners before March 2003 and since.
I wonder, how would the native peoples of the Middle East nations been able to de-ossify their polities? Clearly Bush’s “sledgehammer” approach applied by outsiders was the very very wrong approach, costing and endangering so many lives. Still, middle east people can’t live in Saddam/Saudi style dictatorial polities forever. How can the people living there redraw the old colonial polities in a manner that truly reflects self-determination, in contrast to the PNAC’s deranged approach? I wish I knew.
From your link to the original EMOO reference at the Iraq Foundation website, it seems that EMOO was the mock title that State Dept. “realists” gave to the radical PNAC-Likud vision of the future Middle East. By mocking the PNAC-Likud vision, perhaps these people at the State Dept. oversimplified what PNAC-Likud has been up to.
We should consider the possibility that PNAC-Likud never intended that this checkerboard game would be played in only one direction — that is, from west to east. A reading of David Frum and Richard Pearle’s 2004 book shows that some among their group intended that this checkerboard game would empower Shi`i in the east and thus upset the hold of every Gulf Arab monarchy on the Persian Gulf, starting with the Saudis. One presumes that Frum, Pearle, and others in PNAC-Likud are glad to see newly released demographic forces pressing back in the opposite direction, east to west.
Those of us in the “peace and justice” community keep looking for signs that the current war is going badly awry, and there are certainly signs this is true. However, your reference to EMOO may not be one of them. We should not discount the possibility that the hawks driving the current war agenda always intended that this new checkerboard game would play out in (at least) two directions, simultaneously. If so, then your retelling of Jordan’s short and troubled history is timely and highly important for all to consider.
It seems once again that Jordan is being pressed into the squeezebox of Middle East politics. And once again the conservative power of monarchy may be the only thing to prevent a wider tragedy. When kings (Abdallah II) and queens (Rania and Noor) become the champions of progress, then you know we are living through a time when politics offers the most sobering lessons about the human condition.
Thanks so much for those speedy and thoughtful comments, both of you.
Sd, I tend to agree that your alternative supposition about the nature of the PNAC project is indeed one plausible understanding of it. I have read the “Clean Break” document of 1996 much more closely than I’ve read any of PNAC’s slightly later position papers… and you’re right that “EMOO” seems to be the (generally fairly dismissive) characterization given of the PNAC project by others, not the PNAC-ers themselves.
“Clean Break”– which involved many of the same authors– advocated changing far more sweeping than only along that single east-west axis. It’s main “target” indeed was regime change in Syria, with regime change in Egypt and Saudi Arabia helping– so they hoped– to contribute to that.
I’m not sure that they advocated any expansion of Iranian power, however– though there have always been some inside Israel who have advocated the (basically counter-Arab) approach of strengthening any and all non-Arab powers on the “periphery” of the Arab world.
The issue you mention about kings and queens being more “liberal” than many republican leaders is an old concundrum in the Arab world– not just in the Arab East but also in Morocco (vis-a-vis leaders of republics in Algeria and Tunisia.)
Inkan, you’re right these are very tough issues indeed. All I can say is that coercion, military force, and foreign military occupation can certainly be expected to make things worse, not better, and listening to the voices and grievances of a broad range of people in the region on a non-discriminatory basis is the only way for outsiders to start to help them move forward.
Great stuff, Helena. Thanks. We can endlessly debate neocon strategy, but we know what their ultimate aims are, or were. What turns all of this into classical tragedy is that they are destroying the very institutions they wanted to build upon, at the very apex of their power and influence.
“it seems that EMOO was the mock title that State Dept. “realists” gave to the radical PNAC-Likud vision of the future Middle East.”
I said a while ago that the project of Big Israel from Neil River in Egypt to Euphrates Riverin Iraq , some denying that and asking for prove for what I said.
Its clear to me and to those who hide their believe in Big Israel it exactly what “US State Dept. “realists” gave to the radical PNAC-Likud vision of the future Middle East” THE BIG ME PLAN.., after they found that the war and occupying the land its not can work more with the new world, its time now to move to new scenarios as BIG ME
This realty that we facing in ME whatever those “Peace Loving People” telling us.
“listening to the voices and grievances of a broad range of people in the region on a non-discriminatory basis is the only way for outsiders to start to help them move forward.”
Helena I whish you could, but I doubt it…..
For 105 years we suffer from your distractions in ME all the time you came to us and kill us for no reason just because we born on a rich Land with a lot of resources in it God gifted to us.
The first thing you and other looking to help those grieving is sort the main cause of the grievances it is ISRAIL…..
“the warrior-dynast Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud insisted on staying on in that part of the Arabian peninsula. Insisted it belonged to his family, not anyone else’s. (And certainly that it wasn’t for the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to give it away to anyone else.). So the Hashemites were left to wander like Moses in the desert…
Helena I think this not quite right.
Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud he was just a gang fighting near North East Al Hujas (which is now A Riyadh city his born town) with some member with him. His ambitions for power guide him to Muhammad Bin Al-Wahab who was tired from getting support and recognitions from the religious leaders in Iraq or Egypt he was visited before. when he was back in Basra south Iraq he met with a Brit explorer/Spy (this spy he was in the region for long time putting maps from Iran West Iraq East and South top of the Arabic Gulf) who read his mind then he guide him to Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud so they both had ambitions to get control of Al Hujas one with religious mind and the other with Power loving mind.
With Brit support with maps and weapons Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud got control of the Al Hujas and he name it then with his family name Saudi.
Al Sheriff Hussein was some sort of bothering case to Brits at that time as he keep asking for his reward for supporting the Brits against the Othman, so first he rewarded with “was created in the post-WW-1 carve-up of that part of the previous Ottoman Empire– primarily to be given as a sort of “consolation prize” to a branch of the Hashemite family” as the kingdom Brits promised him (in fact that his condition for supporting the Brit from the start), then his son set king for Syria first then sent to Iraq, in the end Al Sheriff Hussein killed and most probably assassinated to finish the case with him.
BTW, the Brit in same time they promised Al Sheriff Hussein with Palestine Jordan and Syria also they promised the Zionist the Jewish State in Palestine, they lie on Al Sheriff Hussein.
I take the deafening silence in reaction to Salah’s recent postings that y’all agree with what he has to say.
The Iranians– who didn’t even really feature in EMOO-Mark 1– have majorly extended their influence westward into Iraq. That has squeezed the Sunni Arabs of Iraq… And now, using the network of linkages that’s always existed between western Iraq and Jordan, the chaos and violence from Iraq have been bleeding over into Jordan, too.
I don’t know why you drive it like that. Even though king Abdullah spoke out about the “Sha’ait Crescent”
I read it in different way, first, Jordan it’s the way that most Iraqi go through beside Syria, also the Sunni had originally tribes relation with Syrian and Jordanians counterparts so there is a good relation originally their beside that 13 years of Inhuman sanction set a good relation between Iraqis and Jordanians with normal level I am not talking about the government levels, so the reality is both side see the war in Iraq is unjustified.
The recent development of the Syrian case with US and UN rises many a awareness that Jordan represented by King Abdullah, it might he pass his awareness to US administration and his disappointing with US about Syrian case and how the case developed, make “necon” thinking about a new scenario needs to be plaied to stop any sport for Syrian position that US/UN try to built in same talk to widening the gap between Iraqi “Sunni” and Jordanians that comes to play the shadowy Zarqawi scenario.
The laughing matter after the Jordanian explosions that US offered their help to Jordan…., what on earth thy can help in this case there are in Iraq three years and thy can even find their way who is Zarqawi and his players so what they can do for the Jordanians? Funny support and expertise.
BTW, whatever said on the internet we can not take it a grantee prove in nay way specially what we saw many cases in fact any one with good knowledge Internet / Programming can face almost every thing, take simple example your email spaces did you know from where and who behind that?.
BTW, whatever said on the internet we can not take it a grantee prove in nay way…
Excelllent point! I agree 100%
Print it. Frame it. Hang it where you see it every day, and don’t forget it!
Its seems that the recent Annan bombings is perhaps a manipulative ploy by some seeking to create tensions between the Sunni-Arab Iraqi refugees of the Mideast and their host nations. Reports of anti-Iraqi sentiments have been heard and perhaps it would take a few more bombings throughout the region (perhaps in Syria next) in order to transform these refugees into a later-day Palestinian diaspora, creating unrest throughout the region in the process.
The main difference being, of course, that among these ‘refugees’ are well-conected Ba’ath elites. It seems that whoever is behind the bombings is immaterial. With the anouncement of the Iraqi identity of the bombers by this group this week the seeds of social unrest has been sown.
Showdown looms over U.S. Internet control
Other countries want an international body to oversee the Internet
who read his mind then he guide him to Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud
Salah, once again I think you’ve absorbed some inaccurate history.
http://islamlib.com/en/page.php?page=article&id=485
Al-Wahab died in 1791 and the Wahabi alliance with Saudis dates to the early 19th century. The British gave far more weapons and cash to Abdulaziz’ rival Hussein ibn Ali, and Abdulaziz famously hated and mistrusted both the British and French. This is why its called the “Arabian-American company” and not Anglo-Arabian. When oil was finally discovered in 1938 the British received not a single concession. The Ikhwan who helped conquer saudi arabia also hated all westerners most especially the british. The Saudi government is an almost purely indigenous political form. I know this puts a kink in the worldview that holds “the West” and colonialism responsible for all Mideast dysfunction but there it is.
“The first thing you and other looking to help those grieving is sort the main cause of the grievances it is ISRAIL…”
I’m not sure how “fixing” Israel is going to help Jordan with its terrorist problem (or the Saudis with theirs.)
Listening to Chalabi’s bold face lies during his current visit to the US, one has to wonder if Chalabi got his education in the same place as this Salah poster. Same arrogance and fantasy, same origin, cut from the same cloth. The NPR correspondent pondered if there is an Arabic word for “Chutzpah”.
Chuck
Abdulaziz famously hated and mistrusted both the British and French. This is why its called the “Arabian-American company” and not Anglo-Arabian. When oil was finally discovered in 1938 the British received not a single concession. The Ikhwan who helped conquer saudi arabia also hated all westerners most especially the british.
I don’t call this “absorbed some inaccurate history”
For your wrong writing, Roosevelt in 1938 who met with Abdulaziz on a military US ship in Al Suisse Canal will tell you how far your miss writing of “Saudi Arabia also hated all westerners most especially the British” its obvious to any one had his mind in his head Studies will not survived in power without Roosevelt agreement and 9/11 will not happened…
one has to wonder if Chalabi got his education in the same place as this Salah poster. Same arrogance and fantasy
No wonder here, Chalabi educated in London and Washington, who studied mathematics at Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Who is rewarded by well known centre in US for his “Smartness”, Chalabi Working with CIA as expert whom you educated him very well with big lies, he is the “Mouth of The Savage Doge”
For your info you remember that small girl the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador for UN she was trained in US and CNN/FOX put her on all the screens and AP forwarded all the lies that little girl trained very well in US by the master to tell fake story about the Iraqi striped the life support devices from the patients in Kuwaitis Hospitals and loot the hospital, or the looting Iraq!!!
More, what about “Belfour” the two promises, what about Ger., Mood who stood in centre of Baghdad shooting “We Are Here Liberators Not Occupiers”
“Saudi Arabia also hated all westerners most especially the British”
Not what I wrote. & FDR (who is neither british nor french) met with Abdulaziz (and farouk and selassie) in 1943, not 1938. the saudis (with the help of the ikhwan) conquered saudi arabia decades earlier without any US support & scarcely any from the british. “and 9/11 will not happened” is laughable considering the most serious challenges to saudi authority have come from radical fundamentalists (eg ikhwan uprising of 1926, 1979 seizure of the grand mosque, Al Qaeda today.)
“By 1945, the U.S. urgently needs oil facilities to help supply forces fighting in the Second World War. Meanwhile, security is at the forefront of King Abd al-Aziz’s concerns. President Franklin Roosevelt invites the king to meet him aboard the U.S.S. Quincy, docked in the Suez Canal. The two leaders cement a secret oil-for-security pact: The king guarantees to give the U.S. secure access to Saudi oil and in exchange the U.S. will provide military assistance and training to Saudi Arabia and build the Dhahran military base.”
Wedged between the Palestinian West Bank, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria, the kingdom has tried to balance Arab loyalties and Western alliances – particularly with the US and Israel – that are not accepted in much of the Arab world.
13 year old Palestinian girl on her way to school shot “some 20 times” by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli army captain who “acknowledged firing two shots from close range into Iman al-Hams after she had been hit” cleared of wrongdoing by Israeli military court.
Soldiers under captain’s command brought charges out of “bad blood,” says court.
Lawyer explains captain acted “in keeping with the military practice of firing into the bodies of combatants to ensure they presented no further danger.”
Captain says, “I am delighted.”
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L15726078.htm
1. John, I agree that this is an outrage, but isn’t it off-topic?
2. “H-2, H-3, H-4, etc..” quaint indeed. the “H” refers to Haifa, where the pipelines used to end in British Mandatory Palestine.
3. Helena, the strategy of working at the edges is called the “periphery theory” and its main proponent was none other than David Ben Gurion.