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9. Jordan and the First U.S.-Iraq War
- University Press of Florida
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9 Jordan and the First U.S.-Iraq War With the onset of the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991, Jordan’s main Arab alliance, the Arab Cooperation Council, became instantly deadlocked as its two most powerful members—Iraq and Egypt—shifted overnight from alignment partners to military adversaries. Notwithstanding the numerous Hashimite attempts at defusing the crisis, the ACC proved an empty shell in the face of its own members’ hostility to one another. And after the crisis, when the smoke had cleared from Operation “Desert Storm,” few noticed that the deadline for renewal of the ACC charter had come and gone. The ACC was, for all intents and purposes, dead; yet the Jordanian architects of that regional bloc had a profound decision to make in their alignment relationships for the immediate future. Which set of Arab and nonArab allies would Jordan support as the threat of war loomed closer and closer? To the surprise and chagrin of its Western allies, Jordan’s historically conservative and pro-Western regime did not follow conventional expectations and support the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. To the contrary, the Hashimites were charged (falsely) with aiding and abetting the aggressive regime of Saddam Hussein. With the entire region undergoing a massive realignment , Jordan was one of the few countries that did not realign. Rather, it maintained its alignment with Iraq while simultaneously attempting to appease all sides of the crisis. This chapter examines the Jordanian response to the Gulf crisis, and particularly examines Jordan’s alignment decision, which confounded most contemporary observers and analysts, seeming to defy all predictions. Between Iraq and a Hard Place? Jordan’s Dilemma While it has become conventional to date the onset of the Persian Gulf Crisis to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, in reality the regional crisis had been underway for several months, only coming to a head with the invasion. Indeed, the invasion itself signalled the end of the earlier cri- 128 / Chapter 9 sis—that between Iraq and Kuwait—and marked the beginning of a new crisis well beyond the Gulf region alone.1 The earlier, more localized, crisis had emerged in the wake of Iraq’s eightyear war with Iran. In the period between the cessation of hostilities in 1988 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Iraqi regime had concentrated on rebuilding its war-torn country and had also actively asserted its regional leadership and status, largely in an effort to gain much-needed aid from the Gulf states to finance post-war reconstruction. Iraq had steadily increased its demands for aid and also for concessions in oil pricing policies within OPEC, culminating in a series of diatribes by Iraqi officials against both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The Iraqi-Kuwaiti crisis escalated with the deployment of additional Iraqi troops to the Kuwaiti border in mid-July 1990. While some observers may have believed the crisis to have been quickly defused following the show of force, all such perceptions were quickly dashed by the sudden invasion of Kuwait on August 2.2 The surprise invasion, in turn, triggered a new crisis, far more global in scope than the Iraqi-Kuwaiti dispute itself. Within 24 hours, Iraq infantry and armored units had crushed Kuwaiti opposition and consolidated control over the small country. Although the crisis began as the most severe of inter-Arab conflicts, Kuwait’s geo-strategic importance to the major industrial powers of the world ensured that it quickly became a global concern. The international political confrontation that followed the invasion was succeeded, in turn, by a major regional war as an international coalition of forces, led by the United States, inflicted a devastating defeat on the Iraqis between January and March 1991. The defeat of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces resulted in Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and hence in the political liberation of that Gulf emirate. Within hours of the news of the initial invasion, the Jordanian position began to form, and was repeated consistently in the months that followed, right up to the outbreak of the war in January 1991. King Hussein immediately attempted to take on the role of mediator in the crisis and began a lengthy set of shuttle diplomacy missions to various capitals. The Jordanian government attempted to forge a role for itself as a neutral mediator between the Iraqi and Kuwaiti regimes, and in a broader sense, between Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. As the crisis...