The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had just begun its first hearings on U.S. policy toward Iraq, and the media was full of speculation on war plans when Abdullah flew into town. In a few blunt remarks, he pointed out a devastating political fact: Bush has completely failed to build a coalition to join him in war against Iraq.
Fresh from talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac, Abdullah said it would be “a tremendous mistake” for the United States to go to war against Baghdad before it had found a way to tamp down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said nearly every major player in world affairs agreed with him. “In the light of the failure to move the Israeli-Palestinian process forward, military action against Iraq would really open a Pandora’s box,” he told the London Times earlier this week.
Blair, the only world leader outside Israel who had publicly defended Bush’s saber rattling on Iraq, has “tremendous concerns about how this would unravel,” Abdullah said in a separate interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday. “Ask our friends in China, in Moscow, in England, in Paris: everybody will tell you that we have concerns about military actions against Iraq. The international community is united on this,” he told the London daily. (British officials declined to comment on Blair’s position, but State Department officials acknowledged that Britain has very serious questions about Bush’s plans.)
The question is whether Abdullah’s brutally frank language will have a lasting effect in political Washington. Bush himself tried to signal he was unmoved, telling reporters at the start of the Oval Office talks yesterday that Abdullah “knows how I feel … He’ll find out I hadn’t changed my mind.”
But in failing to issue a statement or brief the news media after the discussions, the president indicated he was taken aback by the talks. In fact, Washington has rarely seen so scathing a rebuke from the leader of a close ally.
Abdullah even ventured into a realm almost no foreign leader dares go in public, giving a glowing endorsement to Secretary of State Colin Powell in his battle against the more militant stances taken by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Powell, he told the London Times, “is the one man that gets it and understands what needs to be done in the Middle East.” He said Powell, and Bush, as well, grasp the big picture. “But others in Washington are fixated on Iraq, and … you can talk till you’re blue in the face and they’re not going to get it.” If such voices grow stronger, “that would really destabilize American interests” in the Middle East, he added. Then the king crossed a line that has not been crossed in years-if not decades-by warning of the “tremendous loss” if Powell left the administration. Powell has repeatedly stated that he has no intention of quitting.
Yet the Jordanian monarch was pointing accurately at Powell’s genuine loss of influence with Bush. The strongest evidence was Bush’s June 24 speech, in which he announced a cutoff of U.S. contacts with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and effectively demanded his replacement. “It is unfortunate to target any leadership in any part of the world,” Abdullah said of Bush in an interview with the British paper. He predicted that Palestinians will vote for Arafat to show that “this is what we think of what you said.”
Bush may feel tempted to discount Abdullah’s critique for a variety of reasons. Jordan is heavily dependent on U.S. aid, amounting to $315 million this year, or $75 per capita. And as an immediate neighbor of Iraq, which supplies oil at a discount, Jordan is hardly expected to be an active participant in any assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime. Indeed Abdullah’s father, the late King Hussein, stayed neutral in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, leading Congress to cut off aid. (In that war, the senior George Bush led a coalition of 31 countries to force Iraq to abandon its conquest of Kuwait.)
Finally, the public reservations of most Arab leaders are usually dismissed because privately they say that they can weather a public storm provided the military action is carried out swiftly and efficiently. But Abdullah went out of his way before his arrival to say he was not paying lip-service to domestic public opinion. “The Arab people and the American people share a long and important tradition, a tradition of speaking truth to their leaders,” he said in a speech in Aspen, Colo., on the eve of his trip to Washington. “And this year, what people are saying, loud and clear, is that trust is the coin of the realm.” He noted the “essential role” of the United States in bringing about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but added: “Arab trust of U.S. influence remains rather low.”
The only thing Abdullah didn’t allude to explicitly was the impact a U.S. intervention in Iraq would have on Jordan and, more specifically on his throne and on the continued rule of other moderate Arab regimes. He didn’t need to. The experts, whose advice is now being spurned, know the destabilizing effect of such an action all too well. And the others who, as he put it, “are fixated” on Iraq? They, apparently, do not care.
