Zarqawi, a Jordanian export to Iraq, now wreaks havoc in the land of his birth.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
It was inevitable that the terror attacks that struck Amman last week would be labeled by Jordanians as their own 9/11. Though straddling the deadly fault lines of the region, Jordan had --until now--been spared, and the Hashemite realm had remained a place which the storms of the region swirled around and somehow, mercifully, bypassed.
By design or default, the wars and contests that played out west of the Jordan River between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and also eastward in Iraq, all broke at the edge of this desert kingdom. And the realm even did well by these furies: Jordan became the buffer state where Iraqis with money hauled out from a burning land waited out their country's ordeal; and where Israelis and Palestinians, and the powers drawn into their affairs, brokered their diplomatic deals. With the attacks on the three Amman hotels on Nov. 9, the country's lucky run appears to have come to an end.
In truth, the tranquility of Jordan was deceptive, secured by a monarchy that has always been more moderate in its temperament than the population it ruled. "Iraqi Insurgent Blamed for Bombings in Jordan" was a headline on the front page of the New York Times of Nov. 13: Not quite! For Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as his nom de guerre specifies, is a man from the town of Zarqa, a stone's throw from Amman. The four Iraqis who brought calamity to Jordan were in the nature of a return visit, blowback from a campaign of terror and incitement, and a traffic of jihadists that had sent deadly warriors of the faith from Jordan to Iraq. Even as they mourned their loss, the Jordanians could not see or acknowledge the darkness with which they viewed the world around them. "Zionist terror in Palestine = American terror in Iraq = Terror in Amman," read a banner held aloft by the leaders of the Engineers' Syndicate of Jordan who had come together to protest the hotel bombings.
In the drawn-out struggle over Iraq, Jordan is no innocent bystander. It was in Jordan, more than in any other Arab land, that Saddam Hussein was hailed as avenger and hero, a financial benefactor who practically starved the people in southern Iraq as he enriched sycophants and supporters in Amman. From the very beginning of his bid for regional primacy, Saddam had supporters aplenty in Jordan. He had rujula (manhood), he had money to throw around, and he held out the promise that the oil dynasties would be brought down and those borders that worked to Jordan's disadvantage would be erased in pursuit of a pan-Arab dream. A generation ago, it shall be recalled, the currents of Arab political revisionism--the envy of the poorer lands toward the oil states, the bitter sense that history had dealt the Arabs a terrible hand--converged in Jordan. It was that radicalism that forced King Hussein, in the course of the first American war against Saddam in 1990-91, to stay a step ahead of the crowd, breaking with the princes and the monarchs of the Peninsula and the Gulf, and with the United States, to side with Iraq.
Jordan never reconciled itself to the verdict of that war, and never took to the cause of the new Iraq. Sectarianism played its part--the animus against the Shiites of Iraq coming into their share of their country's power runs deep in Jordan's political class. So did pan-Arab nationalism, long ascendant in Jordan, the glue that bonded Jordan's native population with the Palestinians in the realm. From its inception as the unlikeliest of nation-states, Jordan has been the thing and its opposite--a realm ruled by a merciful dynasty and a population bristling under the controls, threatening to overrun the political limits and then pulling back from the brink out of a grudging recognition that the soft authoritarianism of the place was safer than the prospects of calamity. A stranger who encounters Jordan is always struck by that juxtaposition of stability and barely hidden rage. Waves of refugees have washed upon the kingdom: Palestinians who fled the wars of 1948 and 1967; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their cocoon in Kuwait in 1990-91, when their rage at the Kuwaitis and the immoderation of Palestinian leaders put them on the side of Saddam's project of conquest and plunder; and then, of late, a huge influx of Iraqis. It is a wonder the dynasty, and the military-intelligence apparatus that forms the regime's backbone, has maintained the stability of the realm.
Jordan was lucky in two subtle and shrewd monarchs who steered it through mighty storms: the legendary Abdullah I, founder of the realm, who guided the country from its creation in 1921 until his assassination three decades later, in the summer of 1951; and his grandson, Hussein, who ruled for nearly five decades until his death in 1999. These two kings did their best with Jordan, a barren piece of land that made its way in the world through the subsidies and gifts of strangers--the Brits, the Americans, the wealthy oil states that gave to the Jordanians and belittled them at the same time. The Hashemites of Jordan have had bigger dreams, of course: Abdullah I despaired of the "wilderness of Transjordan," thought of himself as a "falcon trapped in a canary's cage," and believed that he was entitled to bigger realms in his native Arabia (lost to the House of Saud), Syria and beyond. The present king, young Abdullah II, is heir to this combustible legacy. There is peace with Israel, but it is unloved by his countrymen, reviled by the professional and intellectual classes and by "the street." He is in the orbit of American power, but his people are given to virulent anti-Americanism. His country makes a tidy sum on training Iraqi security forces, but his people would love nothing more than to see the whole American project in Iraq come to nullity and defeat.
No one in Jordan of any consequence has acknowledged the long night of despotism and terror that Iraq suffered under Saddam. Nowadays, a traveler who makes the short flight between the peace of Amman and the violence of Baghdad encounters Jordanians sure that a great violation had been inflicted on Iraq by an American occupation that upended the "proper order" of things in that country. There is pitilessness in the Jordanian media toward Iraq--a pitilessness the monarch himself recently acknowledged. And there are deep wells of sympathy for the terrorists playing havoc with Iraq's peace. There is willful moral selectivity to spare: it is muqawama (resistance) in Iraq and irhab (terrorism) in Jordan.
Jordanians have never really owned up to the consequences of their sympathies. A restrictive monarchy that keeps them out of political life cuts the deals that matter for them, thereby absolving them of responsibility for the kind of things they proclaim and advocate. In the ample homes nestled in the hills of Amman, the most audacious loyalties and assertions are proclaimed, giving voice to a schizophrenia of a population sheltered by a paternalistic regime but harboring the most atavistic and radical of sentiments.
An unforgiving Islamism has deep roots in Jordan: Whole towns--Salt, Zarqa--are fortresses of this Islamism. This ideology expresses at once the wrath of the poor and the cultural alienation of the traditionalists from the world of the rulers and the Western-educated technocrats and businessmen sustained by the monarchy. There is a Christian minority in Jordan, and a place has been made for them. But this is a country with raw nerves and limited horizons, and the Shiites of Iraq, with their rituals and culture, are a world apart and beyond the pale. Instinctively, there is fear in Jordan that the Shiites will take Iraq and its commerce and its weight and its oil eastward toward Iran, leaving Jordan in the shadow of a mighty and wealthy Israel to its west.
It is too early to know what Jordan will make of this terror that has now come its way. It would be a calamity were the rulers to succumb to the temptation to proclaim Jordan's innocence, its shock and surprise that the safe haven has been violated. True, the assailants who struck the Amman hotels were Iraqis from the Sunni triangle. But the spectacle of displaying the would-be suicide bomber--Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi, with her belt of explosives--on Jordanian television, ought not to become theater and escapism, a message that the terror hails from beyond Jordan's borders. For what they are worth, the public opinion polls--the Pew Survey for one--have steadily documented high levels of support in Jordan for deeds of terror and suicide bombings. Indeed, in an Arab world that has seen ebbing levels of support for such deeds, public opinion in Jordan has stood alone in its steady acceptance of political violence. In one Pew survey, conducted in the summer of 2005, 57% of Jordanians expressed their support for suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. A country with this kind of political culture is in need of political repair. The elite who run that realm have their work cut out for them.
Once more, we are face to face here with the phenomenon of Arab denial, an unwillingness on the part of broad segments of the peoples of Arab lands to own up to the harvest of their own history, and to acknowledge their own creations. We have seen this before, a cynical belief--unstated but powerful all the same--that the terror should play out on foreign soil and spare the populations that spawn it. How else can we explain the anger of Jordanians that Zarqawi had struck his own birthplace? In an unwritten pact with that prince of darkness, Zarqawi was to hit other lands and spare his own. The same logic has played out in the bigger and more deadly case of the Saudi realm. It was only on May 12, 2003--20 months after 9/11, it should be pointed out for emphasis--that Saudis came to understand the wages of terror. It was on that day, in Riyadh, that the terror had struck Arabia itself, when three housing compounds were hit and 34 people killed.
Until then, Saudis had held themselves apart from the terror that had struck America, in America. They had insisted that those attacks were no affair of theirs. They had explained away the death pilots of 9/11 and the 15 young Saudis on those planes. If anything, there had been a sneaking sympathy for Osama bin Laden, the avenger wreaking destruction in bilad al-kufr, the lands of unbelief. It did not matter that there was soot and ruin in New York and Washington, for their own cities were spared.
That day in May 2003 drove home a harsher understanding of terror's reach. A different sentiment took hold in Saudi Arabia, and the custodians of the kingdom set out to face the networks of terror; the religious jurists went to work as well. The mujahideen of yesterday had become, to the jurists and to a population that had winked at terror, deviants from the faith, extremists at war with Islam's teachings. "Good intentions cannot acquit wrongful deeds, and love of religion cannot take precedence over Islamic law," one important Saudi edict ruled: Faith could not be unbridled, and the world imposes its limits and restraints. Arabia was not suddenly remade, but the fling with terror was partially reined in. The malign bird had come home to roost: You couldn't hail ruin in Jerusalem and New York (and Baghdad), yet condemn it in Riyadh.
Jordan will have to arrive at its own reckoning with darkness. Iraq is close by; what issues from Zarqa and makes its way to Iraq, the wind will bring back to Amman. Order must not only be enjoyed, it will have to be claimed and defended, and that yawning gap between what Arabs believe and the way they live will have to be closed.
An embarrassingly large number of Arabs, after 9/11, wanted schooling--and shopping--in London, but hailed the terror that struck its buses and transit. They were full of rage about Iraq's "suffering" under American occupation after years of looking away from the mass graves that littered the Iraqi landscape. Slowly, people in Arab lands will have to see their history as something they shaped by themselves, with their own hands. When this comes to pass, decent men and women will not have to arrive at moral clarity only on the day terror comes to their own doorstep.
Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is the author, among other books, of "Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey" (Vintage, 1999).
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