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7. The Jordanian Alliance with Iraq
- University Press of Florida
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7 The Jordanian Alliance with Iraq This chapter examines why Jordan realigned toward Iraq, and why this alignment would last throughout the 1980s. The emergence of the new alignment was quite striking given the history of Iraqi-Jordanian relations, which had tended to oscillate between coldness and outright hostility, especially from 1958 to 1978. Prior to 1958 Iraq, like Jordan, was also a Hashimite Kingdom. In fact, both countries were originally artificial creations of European imperialism out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Both were British Mandates before achieving independence under their respective Hashimite regimes. But the Hashimite Kingdom of Iraq, ruled by King Hussein’s cousin, Faisal II, was destroyed in a bloody military coup in 1958.1 In the years following the Iraqi revolution, the various regimes that governed the new Republic of Iraq tended to view the Jordanian monarchy with deep suspicion. Indeed, the feeling was even more intense on the Jordanian side. Unlike his less fortunate kin in Iraq, King Hussein had thwarted a coup attempt against his own regime in 1957; following the murder of his cousin King Faisal in 1958, the Jordanian monarch naturally regarded the successive Iraqi republican governments with fear and loathing.2 Yet King Hussein had no intention of allowing revolutionary Iraq to subvert his domestic position, and his regime maintained a cool distance in its relations with Baghdad. Within domestic politics, meanwhile, the Hashimite regime also took the opportunity in 1957–1958 to wrest political control from the parliament , concentrate power in the royal palace, and generally consolidate its domestic position.3 That earlier episode remains a case in point of the deliberalization that can result from the clash of internal and external security dilemmas. More than twenty years after the Iraqi revolution, the regimes in Amman and Baghdad began not only to establish increasingly cordial relations, but also—to the surprise of those aware of the history—to develop closer and closer ties.4 This alignment shift was, in short, a radical departure from recent historical trends. Iraq and Jordan had not been allied with one an- The Jordanian Alliance with Iraq / 99 other since the short-lived Arab Federation, an alliance of the two Hashimite Kingdoms, which had emerged largely in response to domestic security fears and threats of internal subversion sponsored by Nasirist and other nationalist forces. The Iraqi-Jordanian Federation lasted only from February 14, 1958, to July 14, 1958—the date of the coup in Baghdad.5 Twenty years later, Jordan once again allied with Iraq. External Security The new Jordanian-Iraqi alignment emerged in the context of major changes in the politics of the regional system, particularly between 1977 and 1980. This brief but tumultuous transitional period to the 1980s began with Egyptian -Israeli peace accords (widely regarded as Egyptian defection from the Arab camp) and ended with the eruption of a new regional war. This time, however, the war was not between the State of Israel and its Arab adversaries , but between Iraq and Iran, resulting in significant destabilization of the Persian Gulf region. Indeed, the Middle East had been shaken by a bewildering sequence of major shocks: the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, from 1977 to 1979; the 1979 revolution and overthrow of the shah in Iran; the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and, finally, the 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran, triggering an eight-year war of attrition between the two dominant powers in the Persian Gulf. In short, the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s was a period of extreme turbulence and regional crises. The first signs of a full-scale regional realignment, however, began to emerge in the wake of the Camp David Accords in 1978, and became very clear following the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in 1979. Ironically, then, it was not the crises that entailed the outbreak of war, but rather the crisis involving the emergence of peace that was perceived as the greatest threat to many Arab regimes. The unilateralism which characterized the approach of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat toward the ArabIsraeli peace process was widely regarded in the Arab world as treasonous and at the very least dangerous. Sadat had surprised allies and critics alike by a series of dramatic moves, starting with his sudden announcement in 1977 that he would go to Jerusalem . In an unprecedented move, Sadat did indeed make the journey to Jerusalem and, in a speech before the Israeli Knesset, announced his intention to make peace. A...