Every year there was a general inspection, which required a lot of hard work and preparation. You had to lay out all your equipment, and the inspectors would go through the books to see if anything was missing. If you had lost even a spanner there would be big trouble, so all the companies would exchange notes and swap equipment before the big event. Normally the annual inspection was for the entire brigade, but one night the bedouin company commander came up to me and said, “They’re going to have a surprise inspection tomorrow, just for your company. They want to catch you out, so they can send a bad report up to headquarters.” This was unprecedented.
The other company commanders, whom I had thought were my friends, abandoned me and left me to my own devices, but the commander who had kept his distance said, “I’ll give you anything you need.” We worked together all night to make sure my company would be ready in the morning. I apologized to my soldiers, telling them that the extra scrutiny was imposed because of who I was, but that unfortunately we had no choice but to put up with it.
The battalion commander came in with his team the next morning and carried out the surprise inspection. We passed. But then an incident occurred the likes of which I have never seen before or since. The battalion commander walked up to my senior NCOs, who were standing in a line, and said, “Your boots are not good enough.” My men had been up all night, and their boots were gleaming. While looking him straight in the eye, the battalion commander ground his boot into the sergeant major’s. Another senior NCO did not answer a question fast enough, and the battalion commander, breaking all the rules, slapped him across the face, which in my culture is incredibly insulting.
At that point, I snapped. I followed the battalion commander back to his office and said, “If you ever touch another one of my soldiers again, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.” I think that got his attention. I am not someone who easily loses his temper, but his behavior toward my soldiers made me so angry. And although my outburst protected my company, that was not one of my proudest moments.
For the rest of my time in that company, which was around six months, I stayed in my room in the evenings. I never went back into the officers’ mess. My fellow company commanders had let me down, and I elected to distance myself from them. This was the lowest point in my army career, and I gave serious thought to quitting. I badly wanted to talk about my problems with my father, but I didn’t want to get special treatment. So I turned instead for advice to my uncle, Prince Hassan. After we discussed the difficulties I was facing, he suggested that I should wait out the end of my tour and see how I felt.
In 1987, I took a break from my military career and spent a year at Georgetown University in Washington as a mid-career fellow in the Master of Science in Foreign Service program. I studied international relations and got to know the U.S. capital well. When I got back from Georgetown, I again discussed my army career with my uncle, and said I was thinking about choosing a different career. Prince Hassan said, “Why give the bastards the satisfaction?” Although we did not always see eye to eye in later years, my uncle was a source of support and wise advice then, especially over problems that I felt I could not speak to my father about.
After leaving Zarqa, I continued in the armored corps and learned to fly attack helicopters.
In the late 1980s I was invited by General Norman Schwarzkopf, who had recently taken over as commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, to spend a week on a training mission with the U.S. military in the Arabian Gulf. The Iran-Iraq war was drawing to a close, but oil tankers passing through the strategically important Strait of Hormuz would occasionally be attacked, so the U.S. Navy had extended its protection to all neutral ships. Special Forces troops, based on a floating barge in the Gulf, provided extra support, searching for hostile ships.
At that time, the Gulf was a very dangerous place to be. In May 1987 a friendly Iraqi F-1 jet fired two Exocet missiles at the U.S. frigate USS Stark, killing thirty-seven sailors and nearly sinking the ship. The Iraqis said that the attack was an accident. In April 1988 the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was badly damaged when it hit an Iranian mine; one American helicopter was lost in the U.S. response, and both of its crew members were killed. Then, on July 3, 1988, the American cruiser USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian civilian airliner as an attacking military aircraft. Tragically, the Iranian Airbus was shot down and all 290 civilians onboard died.
When I arrived in the Gulf, things were very tense, and the narrow waterways were crowded with American, Iranian, Iraqi, NATO, and even Soviet ships. Over the previous several decades control of the Gulf had been one of the major strategic issues in the Middle East. At Georgetown I had discussed such topics in abstract terms, analyzing the politics of the Middle East like a giant chessboard. But here the chess pieces had surface-to-air missiles and could fire back. I was seeing the larger political issues playing themselves out in real time and understanding both what it meant in practical terms to prevent the Iranians from blocking the Gulf and how small incidents had the potential to escalate quickly.
Although a civilian career has many strengths, some things you get only through serving in the military. If I had been a lawyer in Amman, I would have had a very different perspective of the conflict. But here I was, an army officer observing helicopter missions protecting neutral shipping. It gave me an up close and personal understanding of regional power struggles that would prove to be increasingly useful in the years to come.
I spent three days on the frigate USS Elrod. Although I was well looked after, bunking in the captain’s quarters, it did not make me want to join the navy. After three days, I transferred to a large barge called the Hercules, which was bustling with action. It was interesting to see so many different branches of the military—U.S. Delta Force teams, Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land teams), and regular soldiers, sailors, and airmen—all working seamlessly together. The experience helped shape my enthusiasm later for creating our own Special Operations Command in Jordan.
Not long after that, in January 1990 and almost a year after I was promoted to the rank of major in February 1989, I returned to England for further military training. I spent nearly a year attending Staff College. It was next to Sandhurst, and as I drove through the ornate gates I remembered my time as a cadet, and my old color sergeant predicting that none of us would ever see the inside of the place. His taunt had worked.
As part of our introduction to international politics, we were scheduled to go on a trip to East Berlin, which was canceled at the last minute because of the dramatic changes then taking place. The previous November my fellow students and I had watched in amazement as the Berlin Wall fell and the old world order we had known was swept away. The confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union had divided the globe into two competing blocs. Old certainties would all too soon be replaced with new, shifting alliances.
In the Middle East, countries that had long looked to the Soviet Union as a patron were slow to adjust to a changed world, one in which there was now only one superpower. Opportunists and predators began to make different calculations about war and peace than when the region was divided into Soviet and Western spheres, and a small flashpoint could trigger a global conflict. What none of us at Staff College knew was how soon we would have to confront the new dangers of a changed world.
Chapter 8
“You Guys Don’t Stand a Chance”
On my return from Camberley Staff College in October 1990, I rejoined the Jordanian army and became the representative of the armored corps in the office of the Inspector General. It was my job to ensure that there were common standards of training and equipment across all sectors of the Jordanian military. After Staff College, you are expected to serve at headquarters in a staff posting for at least a year, so I was posted to Amman.
Two months earlier, Iraq had invaded Kuwait. It was a terrible time for all of Iraq’s neighbors. We share a long border with Iraq to the east, and we had to wonder whether Saddam Hussein would stop with Kuwait. My
father was shocked at Saddam’s action and had a tremendous sense of foreboding. As bad as the invasion was, he felt it was the beginning of something much worse. I was with my father at the offices of the Royal Court, known as the Diwan, the day after the invasion. We listened together to the first reports of the Iraqi incursion.
That fall, Saddam Hussein became public enemy number one in the United States. But he had not always been regarded as a villain. A few years earlier he had been viewed as an ally against Iran. Although my father was no friend of Saddam, he had developed a close relationship with him in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, when Jordan was a transit point for Western weapons and intelligence to Baghdad.
Swept to power by the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the overthrow of governments in the region and for their replacement by Islamic republics. Saddam Hussein feared the threat posed to the regional order by the new radical Iranian regime and believed that the Iranians were preparing to attack Iraq. In September 1980, just one year after he became president of Iraq, he launched a preemptive attack on Iran. But the new Islamic Republic fought back fiercely, and for eight years Iran and Iraq were embroiled in a bitter conflict.
Whatever the rationale behind the war, the United States, concerned about Iran’s potential to destabilize the region and angered by the seizure in November 1979 of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, gave assistance to Saddam. Iraq, which already had the backing of the Soviet Union, was thus supported in its war effort by both superpowers. The United States covertly provided Iraq with satellite imagery of the movements of Iranian forces, which helped Iraqi military operations and ensured the success of Iraq’s decisive 1988 offensive. By July 1988, Iran had accepted a cease-fire.
My father thought it was a good idea to expose younger members of the family to international diplomacy, so one morning over breakfast in the mid-1980s he announced that he would be making a visit to Iraq and he wanted some of us to accompany him. The next day my younger brother Feisal and I and two of our cousins, Talal and Ghazi, gathered at Nadwa Palace, a two-story building inside the Royal Court compound, and set out for Baghdad on my father’s plane.
We landed at dusk and were met at the airport by Saddam Hussein, accompanied by his two sons, Uday and Qusay. Ever conscious of security, he had brought along several dummy convoys, all of which left in different directions as we made our way to Radwaniyah Palace, which was not far from the airport. My father’s home, with its ten or so rooms, was decidedly modest by comparison. Radwaniyah was built on a grand scale, with hundreds of rooms paneled in ornate marble, gold faucets in every bathroom, and imitation Louis XIV furniture. This gaudy display was not what one would expect from the leader of a proud country that had given us the wonders of ancient Babylon and had once been the seat of the caliphate.
After pleasantries were exchanged, my father announced that we would stay the night. This was unplanned, a gesture of solidarity now that Iraq was mired in a long and bloody war. Saddam announced that, in that case, the next day the youngsters would all visit Habbaniyah, a large lake in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, to go fishing and swimming. Saddam was ruthless but charismatic and radiated a strange kind of personal energy. He combined the impulses of a traditional tribal leader with street smarts. He was a fascinating character to observe.
Early the following morning we duly assembled in the palace lobby. “We’d love to go fishing,” I said to Qusay, “but we didn’t bring our swimsuits.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll provide you with everything you need.” We flew from Baghdad to Habbaniyah and went to a palace near the lake to get changed. In the dressing room, Talal, Ghazi, and I found garish Hawaiian shirts waiting for us. Although Iraq and Jordan shared a common language, we clearly did not share a common sense of fashion. We were guests and didn’t have much choice, but our security detail burst out laughing when we walked out in our new costumes.
All six of us boarded a small motorboat, the type you might use to pull a water-skier, and headed out to the middle of the lake. At this point Feisal said, “Where are the rods?”
Uday smiled and pulled out a plastic bag filled with dynamite from the bottom of the boat. Grabbing a stick while puffing on a Cuban cigar, he drew a knife and began to cut slashes in the fuse. The idea was that, as the fuse burned down, it would fizz when it hit the knife marks, allowing you to see how close it was to exploding. Grinning, Uday raised the dynamite and lit the fuse with his cigar. The fuse began to sputter and then stopped. “Must be a dud,” he grunted. He threw the stick into the bottom of the boat and grabbed another one.
Feisal and Ghazi were talking and looked on unconcerned, but Talal and I had handled explosives as part of our army training and knew this was beyond dangerous. Any professional soldier will tell you that even if a fuse seems to have gone out, it could still be burning. We pressed as far back into the boat as we could, our faces white as sheets, and prayed the “dud” would not go off.
The second stick did not work either. Finally Uday found one that did, and he hurled it into the lake. The idyllic scene was broken a second later by a huge explosion. “Okay, let’s go get them,” said Qusay, and he suggested that we dive into the water to collect the dead fish that were floating to the surface.
Talal laid his hand on my arm and whispered, “Let’s let them get into the water first. Our family hasn’t had the best of luck in Iraq.” King Faisal II of Iraq and my father were first cousins. They had attended Harrow at the same time and were very close. In 1958, King Faisal was overthrown in a military coup and brutally executed together with the Regent, his uncle Prince Abdel Ilah, and all members of the Hashemite family who were in Iraq at the time. The attackers threw the body of the crown prince out of a window, at which point it was seized by an angry mob and dragged through the streets of Baghdad. The political instability triggered by the coup led to the rise of the Baath Party, and eventually to Saddam Hussein’s ascent to power in 1979.
Finally, Qusay jumped overboard and began grabbing fish and throwing them into the boat. On our return from our “fishing trip” we met my father at the palace. By then, he was ready to go home.
Back in Amman, Saddam’s sons would from time to time send me requests through the Iraqi ambassador for the latest machine gun or rifle, knowing that my position as a Jordanian army officer gave me access to advanced weaponry. Usually I complied, as in Arab culture it is traditional to exchange weapons, and I could not easily refuse a request from another Arab leader’s son. One time I got a request for a gun with a silencer attached. I politely refused, as by then I had heard rumors that Uday and Qusay would test their guns on unfortunate Iraqis in the basement of their palace. The last time I saw Uday he had recently emerged from prison for killing his father’s valet. And the next time I would see Qusay was in Baghdad in January 1991, just before the beginning of the first Gulf War.
On August 2, 1990, after weeks of mounting tension, Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait. Iraqi troops rampaged through Kuwait City, setting homes on fire, seizing goods, and attacking civilians. The emir’s younger brother, Sheikh Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, fought heroically in defense of his country before he was shot by Iraqi soldiers and his body was run over by a tank. Caught up in the turmoil were around four thousand Westerners, including thirteen hundred British citizens and nine hundred Americans. Some of the British and American hostages were used by Iraq as “human shields,” held at strategic military sites across the country in the event of an attack. Sixteen days after it adopted Resolution 660, which demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 664 on August 18, calling for Iraq to let all third-state nationals leave Kuwait. It soon became clear that the United States was organizing a military response in the event that the Iraqi army refused to retreat.
Over a million people poured across our eastern border, fleeing the conflict. This was a massive influx for such a small country, around a quarter of
our entire population at that time. People were camping out in downtown Amman. Jordanians responded with their customary hospitality, coming out onto the streets with gifts of food and clothing. Some even welcomed our unexpected visitors into their homes.
My father strongly opposed Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait, and reiterated Jordan’s recognition of the government of the emir. But he thought this was an Arab problem and that it should be dealt with by the Arab states. Throughout the crisis he did his utmost to work for a diplomatic solution to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. A white paper subsequently published by the government in August 1991 highlighted those efforts in order to clarify Jordan’s position, which was misinterpreted by some at the time.
Working in close coordination with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, my father flew to Baghdad on August 3 to meet with Saddam Hussein. After heated discussions, he managed to persuade Saddam to attend a mini Arab summit in Jeddah on August 5 to solve the crisis within an Arab context. Saddam agreed to withdraw his troops from Kuwait on the condition that the Arab League did not condemn Iraq. He actually announced that Iraq would begin to pull back its troops from Kuwait on August 5. My father believed that he was about to succeed in brokering an Arab solution to the crisis within the forty-eight hours he had requested in his consultations with King Fahd and President Mubarak. But the Arab League rejected this proposal. That evening, the League passed a resolution condemning Iraq’s aggression and calling for an unconditional withdrawal. My father’s attempts at diplomacy collapsed.
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Page 8
