Tag: jordan

So it appears from this Haaretz interview of King Abdullah “PS2” (like most people he can’t find a PS3) that Jordan is joining the fast-growing gang of Arab countries with civilian nuclear programs and an ambiguous attitude as where there is going to be anything more than just civilian. The boy-king says Jordan has to even though it probably can’t afford to, because of those nasty Iranians and their Shia crescent. Which is probably a lot of bull — if Jordan gets a nuclear power station, it’s because men with little black briefcases will have toured Arab capitals trying to sell multi-billion dollar plants with the backing of their governments. If Jordan goes though with, you can bet its power station will be mostly funded by the US taxpayer thanks to the Bush administration pandering to the nuclear energy lobby. That is not to say that other strategic considerations aren’t important, most notably Jordan’s long-term energy security. But this is not Iran’s nuclear program for sure — unless the Jordanians mean that they want to have a nuclear bomb too, but that’s not want he’s saying:

“But, the rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, ‘we’d like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,’ after this summer, everybody’s going for nuclear programs.

“The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We’ve been discussing it with the West.

“I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction.”

I was actually more interested in other parts of the interview that were highly telling of King PS2’s personality.

1. He thinks of himself as a representative of the US government:

I can say that on behalf of the U.S. president and the secretary of state, and I’ve talked to both, that they’re very serious and very committed to moving the peace process forward, because they realize the dynamics of the region at the moment.

2. He’s unhappy about Israel losing to Hizbullah last summer and doesn’t bother to mention the irresponsibility of Israel’s actions:

The frequency of conflict in this region is extremely alarming, and the perception, I believe, among Arabs, and partly among Israelis, is that in the summer Israel lost this round… And that creates a very difficult and a very dangerous precedence for radical thinking in the area. The stakes are getting higher and higher.

But now I suppose I have to reluctantly recognize other bits of the interview were interesting, and I suppose no head of state can give very revealing interviews anyway. Still, his unwillingness to be a tougher critic of Israel, the main “saboteur” of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, is regrettable.

Finally, someone does a decent article on Jordan! The LA Times’ great Borzu Daragahi makes an unconvincing parallel between the Shah of Iran and King Abdullah “PS2”, but his article his shock full of interesting tidbits:

Numerous parallels exist between the shah’s rule and that of Abdullah. Like the shah’s SAVAK security and intelligence service, Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, now in a new hilltop complex in an Amman suburb, operates as a “subdivision” of the CIA, said Alexis Debat, a former French Defense Ministry official who is a counter-terrorism consultant and a senior fellow at the Nixon Center in Washington.

By Debat’s estimates, the Jordanian intelligence agency receives at least $20 million a year in U.S. funding for operations and liaison work. “They’re doing all the legwork for the CIA,” he said.

The Jordanians have become one of Washington’s closest allies in the intelligence-gathering business, second only to Britain’s MI6, counter-intelligence experts say. They are closer to the CIA than the Mossad, Israel’s much-touted intelligence agency, which is considered to have too much of an agenda of its own to be completely reliable, Debat said.

Like the Iran of the 1970s, Jordan has become a receptacle of U.S. interests and trade. American aid to the kingdom has totaled $3.59 billion over the last five years, compared with $1.36 billion during the previous five years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Like the shah’s regime, the Jordanian monarchy has surrounded itself with American hardware. Just before Hussein’s death, Amman took delivery of 16 advanced F-16 fighter jets. “That was a sort of threshold that Jordan crossed,” said Michael R. Fischbach, a professor of history at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. “They got truly advanced weaponry. It made Jordan have aircraft on par with Israel.”

U.S.-made military hardware abounds on Jordan’s streets. Jordanian soldiers carrying American-made M-16 assault rifles and riding in olive-green U.S.-made Humvees watch over sensitive military and political sites in Amman, the capital. Convoys of U.S. military transport trucks move in and out of the country.

Perhaps most controversially, say Amnesty International and other human rights groups, Jordan has become an important nexus in U.S. intelligence’s subterranean “renditions” network, in which terrorism suspects are secretly detained and interrogated in countries with blemished human rights records. Jordanian officials deny participation in the program.

Many worry that bolstering Jordanian security forces amid widespread reports of abuses against detainees has hampered the country’s baby steps toward democratization.

Sure, King PS2 is one of the most contemptible Arab rulers — even if Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an unusually addictive Playstation game. But raising the specter of a Jordanian Khomeini is really scare-mongering (there is no one in Jordan with the stature Khomeini had even 20 years before he came to power to Iran.) If Abdullah went, he would probably be replaced by a more intelligent relative. Anyway, I’m no expert on Jordanian domestic politics so just read the whole thing.