Eminentoes: Who Was Hussein?
Carnegie, Marc
TAO E S by Marc Carnegie Who Was Hussein? Suave celebrity couldn't turn a small king into a giant. E veryone loves a good funeral, and King Hussein's was one of the best. Like the monarch...
...Jordan remains a regional prize, a strategically located parcel of land in an area where victories are measured by the square inch...
...The king stopped just short of calling his brother a traitor, accusing him of amassing a power bloc within the army as he lay dying...
...Insulting the monarch" brings a stiff prison sentence...
...The civilized and highly cultured Hassan had spent 34 years preparing for his role as king—almost as long as 37-year-old Abdullah has been alive—and had acted as regent during Hussein's illness...
...Some rumors said palace officials organized the coup by compiling a file of documents that showed the academic-minded Hassan had used his tenure as regent for personal gain, making a series of questionable business deals abroad...
...One Jordanian joumalist reported that Hassan was so distraught at being cut out, he quickly visited the monarch, laid his revolver down before him, and demanded to be shot if Hussein truly believed he was a traitor...
...D espite his moments of fumbling, Hussein's reputation will rest largely on his role as Middle East peacemaker...
...He was surprisingly good at alienation...
...But in 1973 he sided with the Jews, leading Assad to amass his tanks along the border...
...And speaking of unfair there is the matter of his brother Prince Hassan...
...Others said Hussein had ousted his brother after receiving word that Hassan's wife Princess Sarvath had embarked on an ambitious redecoration of the palace while he lay near death in a Minnesota hospital...
...That was understandable...
...Hussein had been worried about his own image, too...
...Syria for its part has never abandoned the idea that Jordan, like Lebanon, is part of a Greater Syria and ultimately belongs to Damascus...
...Like the monarch himself, his last rites played well on TV—the metaphorical gray and leaden sky might just as well have been made to order for CNN's executive producers...
...And then there is Israel...
...He was furious to discover a deal had been negotiated and agreed upon without him, not least because it again showed the Palestinians—as many as 70 percent of all Jordanians are thought to be Palestinian, though Amman refuses to release the census figures "in the best interests" of the kingdom—that Hussein held less sway over events than he would have liked...
...After that he kept her from seeing their daughter for six years...
...the second replies cheerfully...
...At the press conference after meeting Abdullah two days later, he and the Jordanian prime minister would not even shake hands...
...The Jewish state sent a whopping delegation of 23 officials to the funeral, paying rich tribute to the hallowed "friend of Israel...
...Who was the first to join with Saddam...
...Unremarked amid the din of bagpipes and breast-beating at the king's funeral, the wails from the minarets and the numbing drone of hollow tributes, there was also to be heard the discomfiting gurgle of the region's unsavory leaders licking their chops in giddy anticipation...
...There was something fraudulent, even distasteful, about the robust self-congratulation indulged in after Wye was signed...
...Yet one could be forgiven the suspicion that his heroic efforts involved a degree of willful political myth-making...
...He dismissed the first wife after 18 months, sending a telegram while she was on vacation abroad to tell her the marriage was over...
...After he died, Israelis and Palestinians alike praised his efforts at peace, and The American Spectator • April 1999 63 President Clinton even said he "loved" the late king...
...No more was heard about that story—the reporter who wrote it was arrested...
...That brief episode revealed what the cameras at Hussein's funeral could not—that the king was more mourned than missed, that peace had almost nothing to do with the man universally acclaimed as the peacemaker...
...Upon his death the media called up a treasure chest of folksy anecdotes that portrayed the wily autocrat as just a regular guy—how he passed harmless hours nattering away on his ham radio, how he addressed everyone as "sir," how he once ordered his driver to pull over so he could comfort a woman he saw weeping by the side of the road...
...Her son had been imprisoned, and the king had her chauffeured to the palace the next day, where she found her errant boy waiting for her...
...Now the deal has been suspended indefinitely...
...Hussein took the extraordinary step of making his letter of dismissal public —it is available, in fact, on the late king's website...
...Hussein was a more complicated man, and a less pleasant one, than the pure and pristine soul of funereal myth...
...The agile Hussein, miraculously, was out of the country...
...Then he performed yet another staggering about face, trying to win back the Palestinians by proposing the creation of a United Arab Kingdom incorporating a Palestinian state, a proposal that was rejected by all concerned—the Palestinians, Israel, the Arab world, the United States...
...He formed and re-formed governments even more often than he switched political allegiances, freely interchanging civilian and military cabinets as the need arose...
...One in five people in the kingdom is unemployed, according to official figures, and unofficial estimates put the number much higher than that...
...Both were improbable, but in any event putsch came to shove, and Hassan was gone...
...Worst of all it prompted Kuwait to expel its Palestinians—most of whom took refuge in Jordan, further overburdening its creaky economy...
...With just days to live, Hussein dismissed him as crown prince and named his eldest son Abdullah heir to the throne instead...
...As the old Israeli joke has it, one man asks another if he is an optimist or a pessimist...
...Wye was an outgrowth of the 1993 interim peace accords, which were signed in Oslo, and in secret...
...In 1967 he backed the Arabs against Israel, costing him the West Bank and swelling his increasingly difficult refugee population...
...The "stability" for which he was so fulsomely praised was the stability of the tightrope walker who discards his balance pole to avoid tumbling off...
...With the death of Hussein the kingdom is, quite simply and suddenly, up for grabs...
...He was respected throughout the region despite lacking his brother's charm and distinguished military record...
...His presence at the talks could have been only a symbolic one, but it was the kind of symbolism Clinton badly needed...
...At the outset he fashioned himself as the international representative of the Palestinian people, but as Yasir Arafat and the PLO rose to power in his own backyard, Hussein became disillusioned and then frankly worried...
...Assad has already turned Lebanon into a client state: He keeps 35,000 troops there, hand-picks its presidents, and conveniently made sure that Lebanon's towns and villages were supplied with official voting booths for February's Syrian "election"—in which Assad was the only candidate, and got 99.98 percent of the vote...
...These things are not entirely Hussein's fault, but while it is unfair to blame the king for the region's intractable antagonisms, it is equally ludicrous to praise his labors in negotiating a worthless agreement...
...The PLO had laid claim to being "the only legitimate spokesman for all matters concerning the Palestinian people," and in 1970 Hussein carried out a brutal and bloody suppression of the group...
...For one thing he was known to appreciate a well-turned ankle, and had he not been to the manor born—had he been, say, a professional basketball star—there might have been more comment about the 11 children he sired with his four wives...
...I believe today will be much better than tomorrow!' One sensed Hussein never quite got the joke...
...Within days the Israelis and Palestinians were hurling threats and accusations at each other as it became clear that Arafat had no way of fulfilling his commitments, and Netanyahu no intention of meeting his...
...Hussein had managed to alienate everybody...
...Even when Assad deliberately skipped the long, slow funeral procession in order to avoid appearing near blood enemies from the Jewish state, CNN's Walter Rodgers could manage only the hapless comment that "perhaps" the Syrian leader wanted to distance himself from the Israeli delegation...
...But two weeks before, while Hussein was still hanging on at the Mayo Clinic, Israel's Haaretz newspaper again raised the astonishing idea—favored by some hard-liners in the Netanyahu government—that Jordan was actually founded on Israeli territory, and wouldn't it be the perfect place to put all those troublesome Palestinians...
...Assad was the first state leader seen at Hussein's coffin, and the first to buttonhole the new king for a one-on-one meeting...
...Poverty is widespread, and when the government hiked the price of bread in 1995, riots erupted across the nation...
...64 April 1999 • The American Spectator...
...The knight of peace," Netanyahu scoffed...
...The Middle East abounds in such ironies...
...He banned all political parties, and the clusters of CNN cameras at the funeral gave no sign that press censorship in the kingdom is harsh and punitive...
...Hussein was a celebrity, of course, a man of enormous charm, a royal with the common touch...
...Hussein also badly mismanaged the Palestinians, shifting from one stance tothe next as events overtook him...
...The Black September debacle —an outright civil war—left thousands of bodies piled on the streets...
...In 1990 his refusal to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait cost him hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and gained him the enmity of the West but no favors from the Arabs...
...I t was an untidy end that showed, yet again, that stability is in the eye of the beholder...
...This sort of thing was touching, at least as long as one didn't think to ask who imprisMARC CARNEGIE is The American Spectator's correspondent-at-large...
...An invasion was averted only by Israel's threat to launch an air attack on Syria...
...And while it is true that he found himself in a rough neighborhood—the geopolitical equivalent of the projects, an unsafe battleground teeming with thugs—he adapted himself readily to the local style...
...Yes, and perhaps the king wasn't feeling all that well...
...The president was in the thick of his impeachment debacle, and the signing of the accord helped burnish his battered image...
...Hussein had dragged his cancer-riddled body out of hospital to "save" the Wye River negotiations upon which the president had staked so much of his dwindling credibility...
...Only once Oslo was a fait accompli did he go on to sign his much-vaunted peace treaty with Israel a year later...
...The network treated the affair as a celebrity send-off, a Diana-like extravaganza in which the stars paying their respects just happened to be world leaders—Clinton, Netanyahu, and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad instead of Elton John, Tom Cruise, and George Michael...
...Iran quickly rattled its sabers after Abdullah — in his first and woefully early error of statesmanship declared that the Islamic republic is a menace in the Middle East...
...In October, before the Wye agreement was signed, Western intelligence services and Arab newspapers alike were aware that Hussein was terminally ill...
...Oh, an optimist...
...Everybody, it seems, wants something...
...oned the boy in the first place...
...Clinton was quick to put in a bid from the United States, promising Abdullah he would push $30o million in aid through Congress in part, or largely, because the administration would like Amman tobecome the regional base of the Iraqi opposition...
...On the eve of his first state visit with Abdullah in late February, not even a month after he had gushed praise for the late Hussein, Netanyahu delivered a scathing address in which he assailed the king's support for Iraq in 1990...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
