by Eric Margolis
NEW YORK - King Hussein of Jordan was a splendid king, and a true
man's man, a graceful, accomplished ruler whose noble yet
unassuming character deeply impressed all who knew him. His death
last week marks the end of an era of post-colonial Mideast
history.
Hussein ibn Talal personified both what is good about the Arabs,
and, sadly, much of what is wrong with the Mideast. Hussein
lifted up his tribe, the Beni Hashem, and left them a well-run,
decent, humane country that stands in sharp contrast to the other
dreary despotism's of the Arab World. He inherited a poor,
unstable, artificial kingdom created by British imperialism, yet
managed to build it into a remarkably successful nation while
under almost constant siege from Syria, Israel, Egypt, and the
Palestinians.
Yet during the four decades of his long reign, Hussein's priority
always remained his own royal dynasty, and his desert tribe.
Hussein was the last of the generation of Arab "brown Englishmen"
who ruled his nation as a surrogate, or overseer, for western
interests.
Hussein was put onto the throne of his tiny kingdom by the
British, and kept in power by British, American, and, later,
Israeli military protection. He became a CIA "asset" in 1952 and
continued to receive secret US stipends until his death. The
dashing king and his crack Bedouin army - created as the famed
Arab Legion by Glubb Pasha - became one of the west's most useful
allies in the Arab World.
At the same time, Hussein played a murky, many-sided role in the
long Arab-Israeli dispute that few outside the Mideast
understood. Hussein's grandfather, King Abdullah, secretly
colluded in 1947-1948 with Israel's leader, David Ben Gurion, to
divided between them the Palestinian state mandated by the United
Nations when it partitioned Palestine between Arabs and Jews. As
a result, Jordan became a covert ally of Israel in suppressing
the Palestinians, and denying them a state.
Two-thirds of Jordan's people are Palestinians. Hussein ruled the
kingdom through his US-supported Bedouin army and security
forces, using them to crush attempts by Palestinians to oust the
monarchy. In 1970, Hussein unleashed his tanks against
Palestinians in Amman, killing over 3,000. All attempts by
Jordan's Palestinian majority to gain any political voice were
put down ruthlessly.
While pretending to join the Arab crusade against Israel, Hussein
more often than not secretly sided with the Jewish state. In
1973, for example, when Egypt and Israel were planning a surprise
attack on Israel to regain lands they had lost in the 1967 War,
their "ally," Hussein, actually went secretly to Israel to warn
Golda Meir of the impending attack Jordan was long used by the
United States and Britain to thwart the pan-Arabist ambitions of
Egypt and Syria and to combat Arab nationalism.
Since the early 1980's, Jordan has been a de facto Israeli
protectorate. In the long struggle between Syria and Israel for
regional domination, Israel got Jordan, while Syria ended
controlling Lebanon. This fact was underlined last week.
Tellingly, one of the largest delegation at Hussein's funeral
came from Israel. It included Gen. Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the
massacre of thousands of Palestinians at the Shatilla and Sabra
Camps in Lebanon, and the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence
agency, which had only recently tried to assassinate a
Palestinian Hamas leader in downtown Amman. The obvious lack of
concern by the Jordanian government for the feelings of the
majority of its citizens, who are Palestinians, went unnoticed by
the western media.
Amid the outpouring of tributes to King Hussein, not once was the
word "democracy" ever heard. The king was dead, but Jordan would
remain a feudal monarchy, in which the majority had no political
rights or legitimate expression. Hussein's son, Abdullah, an army
general, would rule as his father did, at least for the time
being.
The US and Britain, who so vociferously denounce denial of
democracy in China and Burma, rushed to show total support of the
new Jordanian monarchy. Democracy may be fine for nations in
which the west has no strategic interests; but in the Mideast,
the kings of Arabia, the Gulf, Morocco, and Jordan remain the
chosen instrument of western influence and domination. If free
elections were ever held in these kingdoms, including Jordan,
their western-supported regimes would likely fall. This will not
be allowed to happen. "Stability," the current code word for the
western oil Raj in the Mideast, must be maintained at all costs.
Arab rulers eagerly cooperate with the west in denying their
people political and human rights in return for immense personal
wealth, annual stipends, and protection from their citizens or
neighbors. Hussein, for all his greatness as a king, and his
personal decency, was a leading example of this old school of
western surrogate rulers: to the west, he was "the good Arab." In
fact, he spent as much effort undermining fellow Arabs as he did
uplifting his own tribe.
The Mideast's people deserve better. Alas, the few Arab regimes
not controlled by the west - Syria, Iraq, Libya - have proven
even more brutal, anti-democratic, and repressive than their
feudal neighbors. The only choice in the Mideast seems between
medieval monarchs and generals: the Arab World remains in the
political Dark Ages.
The Arab nations, as the Economist said so aptly, are still
"tribes with flags." Hussein of the Beni Hashem was a
magnificent tribal chieftain, but not, sadly, a great leader the
long-suffering, backward, bitterly divided Arab people so badly
need.
[Eric Margolis is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and
broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada.]
Copyright © 1999 Eric Margolis - All Rights
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