KING HUSSEIN LOOKED awful. His face was drawn and pale, his eyes as cloudy as the sky on that piercingly cold January day in Amman. The king was near the end of a long battle with cancer, desperately ill and about to return to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for one last bone marrow transplant. Lisa and I joined the royal family and a handful of senior Jordanian officials at the airport to bid him farewell. The mood was heavy with anxiety and anticipation. After nearly a half century under Hussein’s leadership, Jordanians were coming to grips with the prospect of losing the only ruler they had ever known.
A small receiving line formed on the way to the king’s plane. He walked slowly, propping himself up with a cane in acute discomfort. His voice was uncharacteristically weak, but he was still as gracious as ever. I told him that our thoughts and prayers were with him, and that he—and Jordan—could count on our support. He squeezed my hand, smiled, and leaned in to whisper a few words of appreciation.
Queen Noor was in tears beside him, looking tired and sad, but trying hard to smile. Crown Prince Abdullah and Princess Rania, standing alongside Hussein and Noor, looked a little stunned, having learned within the last few days that they would become crown prince and princess—and before long, king and queen of Jordan.
After the king’s plane had taken off, several of the royal guards—stalwart East Bank tribesmen—began to sob quietly. One elderly royal court official stopped me as I left, took me by the arm, and asked, “Do you ever think we’ll see him again?”1
MY RETURN TO Jordan as ambassador, a little more than a decade after the end of my first diplomatic posting, was fortunate on several levels: It was unusual to have an opportunity to serve as ambassador so early in my career; it turned out to be an unusually interesting time to be in Amman, with the transition from Hussein to Abdullah emblematic of wider dramatic change in Jordan and the region; and it was as enjoyable a tour as our family ever had overseas. Lisa’s work as the State Department’s regional refugee coordinator often took her outside Jordan, driving her armored Suburban to visit Palestinian refugee camps from the outskirts of Damascus to the crowded center of Gaza. And my own job was a significant professional test, trying to steady and reassure a small but crucial partner at an historic inflection point.
I came to the assignment with the benefit of another demanding tour on the seventh floor behind me. Sitting between the offices of the secretary and the deputy secretary, I had spent more than two years leading the Executive Secretariat, a 160-person bureau that handled the relentless flow of information to the department’s senior leadership; tasked material to prepare the secretary for meetings in Washington and abroad; organized the secretarial travel schedule; monitored implementation of secretarial decisions; and ran the Operations Center, the twenty-four-hour nerve center of the department, responsible for managing crises and connecting the secretary and senior officials to our embassies and their foreign counterparts.
It was a prestigious if mostly thankless job, with a punishing pace and recognition that usually came only when problems emerged or mistakes were made. The Operations Center typically juggled calls to foreign ministers and other senior foreign officials with remarkable dexterity, even in the most acute crises. On one memorable occasion early in my tenure, however, I got a late-night call from an irate senior department official, who had been accidentally connected to the wrong foreign minister. It hadn’t helped that the minister on the line was a rival of the neighboring minister he had sought to speak to—and it really hadn’t helped that my senior colleague had plowed through about five minutes of his talking points before realizing that he was speaking to the wrong person. Fortunately, the minister on the other end of the line had more of a sense of humor than my colleague, and calamity was averted.
Leading the Executive Secretariat was in a way the managerial and logistical complement on the seventh floor to the substantive work of the Policy Planning Staff. If Policy Planning was, especially in Baker’s time, like a ship’s navigation team, the Executive Secretariat was more like the engine room, where all the gears connected. The experience of leading both bureaus helped me understand how to marry policy ideas with policy action.
Warren Christopher was entering his last year as secretary when I began my new role as executive secretary in early 1996. Gentlemanly and deeply experienced, Christopher had served as deputy secretary under Secretary Cyrus Vance in the Carter years, and as deputy attorney general in the Johnson administration. Always well prepared, Christopher was as precise in his conversations with foreign counterparts or public statements as he was in his attire. In his bespoke suits, he could make even the most fastidious around him feel disheveled. I admired his quiet dignity and professionalism in a town that often prized self-promotion and chicanery. He was shy in public, but employed a dry wit, and took great pleasure in puncturing inflated egos. After one assistant secretary droned on at a morning staff meeting, Christopher leaned toward me and deadpanned, “Remind me to bring my ejection button next time.”
His successor, Madeleine Albright, thrived in her public role, and had a particular flair for putting foreign policy in practical terms. She could do diplomatic convolutions when she had to, but was much more in her element questioning the “cojones” of the Cuban regime after it shot down a defenseless civilian aircraft, or bluntly challenging Balkan despots. Proud to be the first woman to serve as secretary of state, Albright was a formidable presence on the international stage, extremely hardworking, and adept at managing hard issues and complicated personalities.
Along with Pat Kennedy, the acting undersecretary for management legendary for his bureaucratic wizardry, I led the department’s transition effort from Christopher to Albright. This traditionally involved the preparation of dozens of voluminous briefing books on every conceivable issue that a new secretary might encounter, either in her confirmation hearing or in her early months in office. Given that Secretary Albright had already served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for four years and was intimately familiar with most major policy questions, we tried to curb the department’s enthusiasm for deforestation. Instead, we insisted that senior officials and chiefs of mission overseas craft their own personal notes to her. We knew that nothing would be more helpful to the incoming secretary than unvarnished first-person assessments of what had gone right and what had gone wrong during their tenures, what issues loomed on the horizon, and what strategies they would recommend going forward.
The results were mixed. Some of the first-person cables were exceptional—honest, insightful, and grounded in thoughtful policy prescriptions. Others were long-winded, whiny, self-absorbed, and deep in the weeds on issues that no secretary should have to address. For a new secretary, it was a useful introduction to the department she would now lead, with all its strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies.
“Friendly takeovers” in administrations of the same party, like the transition from Christopher to Albright, are supposed to be easy. Transitions from one party to another are assumed to be much more difficult. The reality is more complicated. New secretaries, no matter their party, want to put their own mark on personnel and policy. Much as Baker respected Shultz, he wanted to mold the department in his own way, and both he and President George H. W. Bush made clear that they were shaping the first Bush administration, not the third Reagan administration. Madeleine Albright was equally intent on putting her own stamp on the department, but I survived the reshuffle.
The administration was under heavy pressure to cut costs and streamline the foreign policy machinery from Senator Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a caricature of a neo-isolationist and a longtime critic of the Department of State and foreign assistance. With Helms leading the charge, Congress made clear its intention to cash in on the post–Cold War peace dividend, eventually shrinking the size of the foreign affairs budget by nearly half over the 1990s. Reading the tea leaves, the Clinton administration tried to get ahead of the cuts by laying out an affirmative vision for the most substantial restructuring of Washington national security institutions in a half century.
The secretary asked Pat and me to take the lead in managing one significant aspect of this effort—the complicated task of absorbing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department. ACDA, which my father led in the late 1980s, was much smaller than State, with about two hundred staff and a mission that remained essential but had shifted from its Cold War origins. Its consolidation into State was relatively straightforward. We created a new undersecretary position to absorb its key elements and transferred its professional cadre directly into the department.
USIA was a more difficult proposition. Its public diplomacy mission—to expose other societies to American culture, ideas, and perspectives and make the case for American policy—was in many ways even more valuable in the post–Cold War world. It took years to fully merge the two personnel systems and bureaucratic cultures, and we lost much of USIA’s public diplomacy expertise and program management skills along the way. That became painfully apparent in the aftermath of 9/11, especially in a roiling Islamic world. It became even more apparent when Putin’s Russia mounted substantial disinformation campaigns a decade later.
The costs of the Helms-generated cuts and consolidation were long-lasting. At State, intake of new foreign service officers was virtually suspended for four years. This created substantial gaps at mid-level ranks a decade down the road, significantly hindering post–9/11 diplomacy as we struggled to find enough seasoned officers to fill key positions. History didn’t end in the 1990s; we couldn’t afford to rest on our laurels and await the inexorable march of globalization and American influence, and we paid a price for our shortsightedness.2
I learned more than I ever wanted to know about budgets, personnel, regulations, and congressional affairs during my two years as executive secretary. I knew, at least conceptually, that it was an investment that would pay off. But I missed doing diplomacy and was eager to return overseas.
Secretary Albright and Strobe Talbott, by now deputy secretary of state, could sense my impatience, and offered to support my candidacy to become ambassador to Jordan—if I agreed to extend for another year through the summer of 1998. It was a hard offer to refuse, not only because it would fulfill every young diplomat’s dream to become an ambassador, but also because it would allow me to return to Jordan—and this time to experience it with Lisa and our daughters. I had a blessedly uneventful confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was sworn in by Madeleine Albright in late July. Sixteen years into the Foreign Service, I had come full circle.
IN A CABLE to President Clinton on the eve of King Hussein’s funeral in Amman in February 1999, I reminded him of a comment attributed to John Foster Dulles in the early 1950s. “King Hussein is an impressive young fellow,” Dulles said. “It’s a shame that neither he nor his country will last very long.”3 Nearly five decades later, Jordan was still intact, and the king himself had become the region’s longest-serving head of state. He had survived a coup attempt in 1957, the disaster of the Six-Day War in 1967, the events of Black September a few years later, and a series of assassination attempts along the way. He had not only kept Jordan afloat amid the unending turbulence of the Middle East, but created a sense of national identity and an operable, if still fragile, economy.
The practical dilemmas facing Jordan in the summer of 1998 were nevertheless daunting. Water scarcity was an urgent problem; per capita consumption was one-fortieth that of Americans. Unemployment ran at more than 20 percent, with underemployment an equally flammable problem. The population of roughly five million was growing rapidly, GDP growth was flat, and external debt was rising. Jordan had few natural resources. It ran a growing trade deficit, importing most of its food and heavily dependent on outside assistance. Hussein periodically had to employ austerity measures and tighten budgets, but cuts in subsidies brought popular unrest, and the king was generally unable to sustain serious economic reform programs.
As he neared his forty-seventh year on the throne, Hussein was the embodiment of Jordan, the singular guarantor of national unity. Down below, society was still riven by fault lines, some old and some new. Over half the population was of Palestinian origin. East Bankers, the townspeople and descendants of the Bedouin tribes who had populated the hard hills and deserts east of the Jordan River before the waves of Palestinian arrivals after the 1948 and 1967 wars, were fiercely protective of their political control and prerogatives. Several hundred thousand Iraqis had fled to Jordan after Desert Storm. Meanwhile, another newer fault line was widening, between the struggling poor of east Amman and other Jordanian cities and the conspicuously consuming residents of Abdoun and other neighborhoods in west Amman.
Political opposition was closely monitored by the General Intelligence Department (GID). Hussein sometimes let off steam through carefully managed political liberalization; in 1989, for example, he had allowed fairly open elections and the formation of a government that included Islamists. His rule was absolute, but wrapped in a tolerance and relative generosity of spirit that set Jordan apart from other regimes in the region.
If Hussein had a tough hand to play at home, his neighborhood was even rougher. While the king’s longevity, shrewdness, and friends outside the region (in particular the United States) brought him some respect, it came mostly grudgingly. To the north, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria looked down its nose at Jordan—which was a part of Greater Syria during Ottoman times, and was now a country most Syrians thought of as an historical anomaly. To the east lay Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, isolated after Desert Storm but still menacing, a source of concessional oil and a market for Jordan’s goods. To the south, Saudi Arabia often took a dim view of Hashemite Jordan, always mindful that the House of Saud had expelled Hussein’s great-grandfather from the Hejaz in the 1920s. Across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba was Egypt, self-consciously the center of the Arab world and usually disinclined to pay much attention to an inconsequential smaller Arab power like Jordan. And to the west was Israel, which had a strategic interest in a stable, moderate Jordan. Since the 1950s, Hussein had kept up secret contacts with the Israelis. After the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Hussein seized the opportunity to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel, solidifying his regional position and repairing the damage with the United States that lingered after the Gulf War.
By 1998, U.S.-Jordanian relations were quite healthy. President Clinton and Secretary Albright reintroduced me to King Hussein as their nominee for ambassador when the king visited Washington in June. I had been a background fixture in Hussein’s meetings with senior Americans over the years, and his courtly mannerisms and deep, easy laugh were familiar. Clinton and the king had an excellent relationship. The president had obvious respect for Hussein’s judgment and experience, and the king had an equally obvious, almost avuncular affection for Clinton’s intellect and commitment to Arab-Israeli peace.
In that initial June conversation, Hussein was upbeat and looking ahead. “We’ll do a lot together,” he said. “You already know Jordan and our challenges. There is so much we can accomplish during this administration.” Sadly, the king would return to the Mayo Clinic in July, before I arrived in Amman, with a recurrence of an even more deadly form of cancer. He would spend only a couple more weeks of his life in Jordan.
The embassy that I took over at the beginning of August 1998 was a much different place from the one I left in 1984. It occupied a new and much larger complex west of the old center of Amman, built in the early 1990s to fit the new security specifications for American embassies around the world. It contained 130 American employees and 270 Jordanians, roughly twice the staff of the embassy I had left. The compound was about the size of six or seven football fields, and was surrounded by a nine-foot wall. Inside were a sizable circular chancery building, a service annex and motor pool, a social club and swimming pool, and the ambassador’s residence. Lisa and the girls and I enjoyed our new home; what it lacked in privacy it made up for in convenience, with my office a two-minute walk away.
Security was a persistent concern throughout our three years in Amman. On our third night in our new home, Lisa and I were awakened by a 2 A.M. phone call from the Operations Center, and a contingent of Marines in full combat gear barreling upstairs to help secure the residence. An urgent threat report warned that there would be an RPG attack on the embassy compound that night. Fortunately, the plotters were caught in time. A few days later, al-Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, with massive loss of life.
Threats reemerged throughout our tour, and were particularly worrisome at the end of 1999, when a major al-Qaeda attack on Jordanian hotel and tourist sites was thwarted. We had entered a new era in diplomatic insecurity, in which risks—for many years a painful feature of embassy life—were increasing, and Washington’s appetite for risk-taking was diminishing.
SITTING IN HIS hospital room in Minnesota in July 1998, King Hussein gave a television interview that jarred his Jordanian audience. “The doctors’ diagnosis is lymphoma,” he said with a weary smile. “My cancer is a new fight which I hope to win.” There was reason for the king to be optimistic. He was only sixty-two, he’d already won a bout with bladder cancer earlier that decade, and he had one of the world’s best teams of doctors treating him at Mayo.4
Jordanians, however, were uneasy. They had become utterly dependent on one man, and were not used to having him out of the country for months at a time. Through force of personality and political dexterity, Hussein had camouflaged societal divisions in Jordan and created a role for his country on the regional stage out of all proportion to its strategic weight and resources. Most Jordanians had grown unaccustomed to taking political responsibility, let alone thinking about what might follow after Hussein. There was no escaping that now.
Hussein’s younger brother, Hassan, had served as crown prince since 1965, when the king had decided amid a particularly intense spate of assassination threats that it would be irresponsible to keep his oldest son, Abdullah, then only three years old, as his successor. Hussein and Hassan were eleven years apart in age, but the difference in their personalities seemed even wider. Intuitive and full of restless energy, the king had an easy rapport with Jordanians, at home with Bedouin sheikhs in the desert or military units in the field. Hassan was at heart an intellectual. It was hard to imagine him clambering atop a tank to speak to his troops, as Hussein had done so many times over the years. Oxford-educated and widely read, Hassan could come across as a bit detached from the world of most Jordanians—a disconnect reinforced by his official 1998 birthday portrait, in which he posed in full polo regalia, complete with helmet, mallet, and jodhpurs, seated on his favorite pony.
And yet beyond traits that were easy to caricature, Hassan was as devoted to Jordan as Hussein. He worked hard, was deeply knowledgeable about his country, and loyal to his brother. He also had more of a common touch than he was given credit for. When Secretary of Commerce Bill Daley visited Jordan in the fall of 1998, Hassan insisted on driving us back to Daley’s hotel after dinner at his lovely old stone house on a hill overlooking downtown Amman. He got behind the wheel of his Land Rover, with a bemused commerce secretary riding shotgun and me in the backseat, and another vehicle full of royal guards in the rear. Pulling out of the palace gate, Hassan asked if we wanted to stop for tea in the Wehdat refugee camp, which was more or less on the way. Daley was haggard after a long day of meetings, but he knew it would be impolite to say no. And so the three of us wound up sitting at a tiny shop on one of the camp’s densely packed streets at midnight, drinking tea surrounded by curious Palestinian teenagers and an increasingly nervous group of royal guards. Hassan was breezy and nonchalant, asking the shopkeeper about his family, engaging in small talk with other patrons, and basking in the moment.
King Hussein’s long hospitalization in the second half of 1998 became, in effect, Hassan’s dress rehearsal for the throne, after thirty-three years as crown prince. It didn’t end well. There were all the hallmarks of Shakespearean drama—a dying king coming to terms with his own mortality; a beleaguered crown prince trying to show he was ready for a job that was fast receding from him; a royal family struggling with loss and dysfunction; sons coming of age in the midst of so much scrutiny and uncertainty; and courtiers angling for advantage. There were no real villains, just a chain of difficult circumstances and complicated personalities. The king had been drifting for some time toward a change in the line of succession. His illness merely accelerated that decision. His unease about Hassan was not about loyalty or intellect or commitment, but about whether he was the best person to lead Jordan through what the king knew would be a tough transition. And his sense of confidence in his sons had grown as they matured. Prince Abdullah, now in his late thirties, had become an accomplished and well-respected military officer. Prince Hamzeh, now eighteen and Hussein’s eldest son by the last of his wives, Queen Noor, was a cadet at Sandhurst, with a manner and bearing much like his father’s.
As uncertainties about the king’s health and succession unfolded that fall and winter, my main task as ambassador was to place America’s hand on Jordan’s shoulder and do whatever I could to help steady a country on which the United States depended heavily. A stable Jordanian partner was essential to Israel’s security and hopes for Palestinian-Israeli peace, and Jordan’s geopolitical value as a moderate, reliable friend in a tough neighborhood was out of all proportion to its demographic and economic weight. This was a classic opportunity for American diplomacy, as the organizer and mobilizer of support from other countries and international institutions—and for an ambassador as conductor, orchestrating the varied instruments of the American bureaucratic symphony.
Crown Prince Hassan was gracious and welcoming from the start. Barely ten days into my new role, I had to call him a little after midnight to seek an urgent meeting and preview the cruise missile strikes that the United States was about to launch against al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy attacks in East Africa. Without hesitation, he agreed to see me, and we spent an hour or two drinking his favorite single malt scotch and discussing a variety of challenges beyond those lighting up the sky over Afghanistan. Hassan seemed a bit lonely, with few confidants outside his immediate family. That was partly a function of personality, but also partly because the king moved people in and out of his brother’s inner circle and never allowed him to develop an independent political base. Hassan was understandably thin-skinned about stories drawing unflattering contrasts with his brother. He was too proud to look for sympathy but anxious for signs that people respected him in his own right. I went out of my way to make clear that I did.
Prince Abdullah and I were only a few years apart in age. He spent a year at Oxford soon after I finished there, and we had shared an academic mentor in Albert Hourani. At the time, Hourani described Abdullah to me in a letter as “smart and personable” but someone who seemed “destined more for a life of action than of books.”5
In late August 1998, Prince Abdullah and his wife, Princess Rania, invited Lisa and me to an informal dinner at their home. A fan of Japanese cuisine, Abdullah was an accomplished cook, and prepared Kobe beef on the grill. The setting was relaxed and unpretentious, just like our hosts. The only other guests were from the royal family—Abdullah’s brothers and sisters; his mother, Princess Muna, a lovely, down-to-earth person and King Hussein’s second, British wife; and her father, Colonel Gardiner, a veteran of the Italian campaign in World War II. It was the first of a number of evenings that we would spend with Abdullah and Rania over the next few years, including each of the Thanksgivings we celebrated in Amman, when we supplied the turkey and they brought the pies. They were funny and unaffected, with Princess Rania a particularly good judge of people, and Prince Abdullah proud of his family and his growing responsibilities in the military.
With uncertainty about King Hussein’s health hanging over everything, I tried hard to build as broad a set of relationships as I could, inside the royal family and across Jordanian society. I worked easily with the prime minister, Fayez Tarawneh, an affable East Bank technocrat, instinctively cautious but increasingly concerned about Jordan’s economic predicament. The foreign minister, Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib, was a capable professional and good friend. Rima Khalaf, the minister of planning and one of the most senior women officials in the Arab world, was impressive and reform-minded. Samieh Battikhi was then the head of the General Intelligence Department, a shrewd and ambitious operator with a lifestyle obviously not purely a function of his government salary. The GID was already a crucial intelligence partner for the United States; it was also slowly becoming the power behind the throne.
Meanwhile, Crown Prince Hassan was trying to demonstrate that he could manage affairs in Hussein’s absence, without appearing to usurp the king’s authority. It was an extremely difficult balancing act. In September, Hassan stepped on the sensibilities of the Jordanian military leadership, questioning their budget submission and raising the issue of whether it would make sense to accelerate senior military retirements and make way for the next generation. Neither was an unreasonable thought—but military affairs were exclusively the king’s preserve, and Hussein was upset when word filtered back to him at Mayo, undoubtedly flavored by the wounded sensitivities of his generals.
I had easy access to senior Jordanians throughout my time in Amman, and there were times when it seemed a little too easy, especially in this early period. On one occasion, Hassan invited me to sit in on an internal briefing from his military leadership in preparation for a forthcoming meeting of the U.S.-Jordanian Joint Military Commission. I did my best to be unobtrusive, but it was an awkward experience. The crown prince was pointed in his commentary, peremptory and a little patronizing in manner, interrupting the briefers repeatedly to question their arguments. His intent was straightforward. He wanted to ensure a tight presentation, and also to demonstrate his understanding of military realities. But it didn’t go down well with the officers in the room. You could see them gritting their teeth—and thinking to themselves that King Hussein would never have treated them that way.
The crown prince stayed in regular contact with the king during his treatment, but chose not to visit him at Mayo. He thought his role was to mind the store in Jordan, and Hussein seemed to agree. But that put Hassan at a considerable tactical disadvantage, as other senior family members and officials, many of whom were not admirers of the crown prince, flew back and forth to see the king in the United States. The army chief, Field Marshal Abdul Hafez Marei Kaabneh, complained directly to the king on one visit that fall about Hassan, alleging that he was telling senior military officers that Hussein’s condition was “irreversible,” and that they would need to prepare for the possibility of a transition. Hassan later denied to me that he had ever said that. But the damage was done, and the king’s irritation grew. Rumors reached Mayo that Princess Sarvath, Hassan’s intelligent but occasionally sharp-elbowed wife, was agitating privately for Hassan to move immediately if he became king to make their son, Rashid, the new crown prince. Queen Noor, not a big fan of either Hassan or Sarvath, was with the king throughout his treatment, and fed his mounting discontent.
At President Clinton’s request, Hussein flew from Mayo to Washington in late October to help prod the Israelis and Palestinians toward compromise at talks taking place at the Wye Plantation, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The king had a magnetic effect, and played a valuable role in producing the Wye River Memorandum, in which the Palestinians and Israelis finally settled on implementation of the redeployments and other interim arrangements in the West Bank that had been agreed to several years before. On the day of the White House signing ceremony, Hussein received a number of senior Jordanian visitors in Washington, among them former prime minister Abdul Karim Kabariti. They reinforced the king’s concerns about the crown prince. Hussein told Kabariti that he was considering “major changes” when he returned to Jordan.
I heard versions of all of this from each of the protagonists as they returned to Amman. It was clear that the king’s illness was sharpening his focus on the future, and that changes of some sort were looming. Their pace and scope obviously depended to some extent on his health. While the king was upbeat to Jordanians about his prognosis, the reports we were hearing were much more guarded and uncertain.
Hassan was concerned about his brother’s health, and increasingly anxious about the reports of royal displeasure with his performance. He invited me and my exceptional CIA station chief, Rob Richer, to a private dinner soon after the Wye agreement, and fished politely for information on the king’s health and disposition.6 I was careful; there was no percentage in getting in the middle of what was a thorny royal decision. There had already been erroneous stories in the British press in the fall that the U.S. administration lacked confidence in Hassan. We had quickly knocked them down, and Madeleine Albright had even called Hassan to reassure him. Moreover, I was still not yet entirely convinced that the king would push Hassan aside. It seemed to me that our role in this delicate moment was to make clear our strong and enduring commitment to king and country, steer clear of political infighting, and keep our lines open.7
I had ample support from Washington. In November and December alone, we had visits to Amman from Secretary Albright, Secretary Daley, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, and CIA director George Tenet. I pressed the administration to do all we could to invest in our relationship with Jordan now; if Hussein’s health worsened, more tangible backing at this point for Jordan’s economy and security would put us in a stronger position to support the transition than if we had to scramble later to catch up with events.8 The White House began to consider a supplemental assistance package and other contingency steps we might take to shore up the dinar and avoid financial panic.
By early January 1999, the king had completed his treatment at Mayo. It would take a couple weeks to determine whether his bone marrow transplant had cured his cancer, but popular expectations for a full recovery were high. I flew over to see him before he left the United States, just after New Year’s. We met at the house the king had owned for some years in suburban Maryland, on a high wooded bluff overlooking the Potomac. It was a gloomy winter afternoon, with a clear view of the river through the leafless trees. He was weak, shivering beneath his heavy sweater. “I am eager to get home,” he said. “It has been so long, and there is so much to do.”
I congratulated him again on Wye. He smiled wanly, underscoring his skepticism about both Netanyahu and Arafat, but emphasized how much faith he had in President Clinton. “It will be good to work with you once I’m home,” he continued. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about the future. I don’t know how much time I have left in this world, and there are some things I need to do.” Hussein left it at that, and made it clear that he didn’t want to be drawn out. I returned to Amman convinced that a change in succession was coming.
Hundreds of thousands of Jordanians lined the streets to welcome the king back home on January 19. The next day, Hussein gave an interview to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, in which he hinted—for the first time in public—of changes to come. The king kept putting off a meeting with Hassan, and the crown prince knew what that meant. I saw him on the afternoon of January 21, and he told me that Princess Basma, the only sister of Hussein and Hassan, had just come over to tell him that he was on his way out. Hassan was in deep distress. “I truly can’t understand why the king is so upset with me,” he said. Nevertheless, he would handle the decision with dignity.
Finally, on the night of January 22, the king told Hassan he had decided to change succession. Earlier that day, he had informed Prince Abdullah that he would become crown prince. The king made his choice public on January 25, publishing an uncharacteristically mean-spirited letter detailing his disappointment in Hassan. His treatment had failed, and he would have to return to Mayo the next day for a last-ditch effort to save his life and a second bone marrow transplant.
At thirty-seven, Abdullah was nearly two decades older than his father had been when he took the throne. Jordan was a far more stable place than it had been then, but there was no shortage of challenges on the horizon, or regional predators. Abdullah knew how much he had to learn, but did not seem intimidated. Secretary Albright made a brief but timely visit to Amman on January 28, reassuring the new crown prince and pledging American support for Jordan. I saw Hassan again a few days later. There were no visitors waiting to see him, and he commented wryly that he didn’t expect many to seek him out. He was clearly hurt by a turn of events that he still didn’t fully comprehend, but he had no interest in seeking sympathy. I told him I admired the grace with which he was handling all this, and I meant it. For all his years of service as crown prince, Hassan’s biggest contribution to the future of Jordan may have been the way in which he managed his biggest disappointment.
The king’s second bone marrow transplant failed, and he headed home again one last time. He had lost consciousness by the time his plane landed in Amman on February 4, and his vital organs were beginning to shut down. In one final display of the stubborn courage that had taken him and Jordan so far, Hussein outlived his doctors’ predictions of death for three more days. As I put it in a cable to Washington, “It was almost as if, conscious or unconscious, the King was determined to show that only he—not CNN or anxious foreign audiences or medical experts, or anyone else—would decide when he would make his exit. He lived a life that ran against the odds. John Foster Dulles was just the first in a long line of people to underestimate him, and Jordan. It is worth remembering that as all of us contemplate a future without King Hussein.”9
February 7, the day King Hussein died, was another in the series of cold rainy days that seemed to reflect the Jordanian mood that winter. I made a point of walking around the embassy to talk to all of our Jordanian employees, individually or in groups. This was as wrenching a national moment as they had ever faced. Many had tears streaming down their faces. I wanted them to know that they could count on American friendship. Later that day, I talked again to King Abdullah. He was sad but unflustered as he prepared for what some would later call “the funeral of the century,” which by Islamic tradition had to take place within twenty-four hours of his father’s death.
It was an unforgettable tableau. Seventy-five countries sent representatives. President Clinton flew overnight to attend, along with the First Lady and three former presidents—George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford. I couldn’t imagine a more powerful gesture of American respect. The other leaders who came sent a similarly impressive signal. They made an unusual scene at Raghadan Palace, as strange a collection of bedfellows as I had ever witnessed, their tangled and occasionally lethal rivalries on full display.
There in one corner was the Israeli delegation, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, looking warily across the room at Hafez al-Assad, whose own health was fading but who wanted to come in a curious show of admiration for the Hashemite ruler he had tried so hard to undermine over the years. Standing not far from the Israelis was Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader whose assassination the Mossad had bungled in downtown Amman a year before. Arafat chatted amiably with Mubarak. Iraqi vice president Taha Mohieddin Maruf scowled from a distance, representing Saddam Hussein, who had only a month before employed his usual tact in referring publicly to King Hussein as a “throne dwarf.” One of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s sons talked with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whom his father would shortly plot to murder. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prince Charles came from London, and President Jacques Chirac from Paris.
Even Boris Yeltsin came, ill and disoriented, and propped up in a corner of the room by two aides—intent upon honoring King Hussein, and upon not missing such a remarkable gathering of his contemporaries. Bill Clinton worked the room as only he could, gripping the arms of his counterparts and consoling Jordanian royal family members. By early evening, the simple burial ceremony completed, Air Force One had departed, and the other delegations had left for home. Jordanians were left to consider the complicated world before them, without the only leader most of them had ever known.
PRESIDENT CLINTON TOOK me aside at one point on the dreary day of King Hussein’s funeral, as we were walking across the tarmac to Air Force One and his return flight to Washington. “The next few months are going to be all about reassurance,” he said. “I’m counting on you to help support these people. Just let us know what you need.” The president was as good as his word, and over the next two years the United States paid careful attention to Jordan’s well-being. I drew on everything I had learned over the years and every connection I had in the executive branch and Congress to drum up and sustain interest in supporting the Jordanians at this crucial moment. I was careful not to oversell the risks King Abdullah faced, but determined to exhaust every possibility to show American reliability.
I believed it was profoundly in our interest to do so. As I wrote in a cable soon after King Abdullah’s accession, “We have a strong and continuing stake in a stable Jordanian partner at the geographic and political center of the Middle East. If we didn’t have such a partner, we’d have to invent one.”10
The day before the funeral, President Clinton issued a public statement stressing his confidence in the Jordanian economy, and confirming that he would ask Congress for $300 million in supplemental military and economic aid. He pledged to work with G-7 and Gulf Arab partners to mobilize more support, including steps to ease Jordan’s $7 billion external debt burden. He said he would work with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to marshal additional help. The president’s vote of confidence helped stave off the run on the Jordanian dinar that officials in Amman had feared, and give the new king a little economic breathing space.
In succeeding months, the administration increased concessional wheat shipments to Jordan. It also expanded the Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) program, which allowed duty-free access into the American market for goods produced in Jordan, so long as they had 8 percent Israeli content (one example was a luggage line manufactured at a QIZ in northern Jordan, in which Israeli-produced plastic handles accounted for the required percentage). By 2000, some forty thousand new jobs were created in Jordanian QIZs. More ambitiously, we provided enthusiastic support for Jordan’s bid to join the World Trade Organization, which was accomplished in the spring of 2000. That was the essential first step in negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement, the first with an Arab country and only the fourth such U.S. agreement anywhere in the world.
When President Clinton and King Abdullah finally signed the free trade agreement in October 2000, it sent a signal of confidence in Jordan that was as much political as it was economic. Other than the precedential effect of the terms of the agreement, and making sure that American businesses could compete on a fair playing field in Jordan, there was relatively little consequence for the infinitely larger American economy. By contrast, it was an enormous psychological and practical boost for Jordan. Thanks to both the FTA and the QIZs, Jordan’s exports to the United States shot up from barely $9 million in 1998 to over $1 billion by 2004. Annual U.S. assistance levels rose dramatically as well, from $7 million in 1996 to $950 million in 2003, as Jordan became the third-largest recipient of American aid in the world.
Meanwhile, King Abdullah plunged into his new role with considerable energy and drive. He quickly overcame doubts about his inexperience, and showed a flair for leadership at home and selling Jordan’s case abroad. He understood that the outpouring of international and regional goodwill that followed his father’s death would not last long. Without the baggage of the Gulf War and his father’s refusal to join the Desert Storm coalition, Abdullah rebuilt bridges to the Saudis and Kuwaitis, and connected easily with next-generation leaders in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Without the competitive tensions that had shaped his father’s relationships with leaders like Hafez al-Assad, he solidified ties with Syria and other Arab neighbors. In his first year on the throne, he visited all of the G-7 capitals, including two productive trips to Washington, where he demonstrated even greater finesse than Hussein in cultivating Congress, and even less hesitation in asking for assistance.
At home, Abdullah built an appealing persona, exhibiting common sense and natural strengths as a unifier. Personable and practical, he got off to a good start with most of the sometimes cranky leaders of the East Bank establishment, and impressed many of the rising figures in Jordan’s tiny and often inert and risk-averse private sector with his modernizing instincts. Abdullah could count on the loyalty of the military in which he had served for more than two decades. He tried to project a populist air, dressing in disguise as an elderly local and observing the bureaucracy at its plodding pace in Zarqa and other poorer parts of the country.
Prince Hassan kept his disappointment largely to himself, and his dignity intact. Samieh Battikhi remained at GID, watching the king’s back but more and more prone to self-aggrandizement. A sturdy East Bank warhorse, Abdul Raouf Rawabdeh, a former mayor of Amman, became prime minister. Not exactly a poster child for reform, but good at soothing establishment sensibilities, the conservative Rawabdeh was balanced by the more risk-taking Abdul Karim Kabariti, now chief of the royal court. Kabariti reinforced the king’s reformist impulses, and together they drove a fair amount of change: privatization of the telecommunications sector and several significant companies; legislation to protect intellectual property rights; a new economic consultative council; and a major initiative to attract investment in the information technology sector. The king himself didn’t hesitate in that early era to roll up his sleeves and hold his ministers to timetables and action plans—a novel experience for most of them.
The king was easy to talk to, and we usually saw each other several times a week, whether at his office at the palace, at home in Amman or Aqaba, or at events around Jordan. I was always careful not to waste his time or abuse my access. I was equally careful to balance my relationships with the royal family and senior government officials with a range of other Jordanians, and to keep a sharp-eyed perspective on what was going right in this complicated transition and what challenges loomed.
“Clientitis” is a common affliction among diplomats, the tendency to gradually conflate the interests of the country you represent with those of the country in which you serve. One symptom is a selective blindness to the country’s flaws, exacerbated by the seductive power of access and apparent influence. I tried hard to avoid that during my time in Jordan, but didn’t always succeed. I kept my lines open to critics of the Jordanian elite and my attention fixed on obvious problems of economic stagnation; corruption that was small-bore by regional standards, but nonetheless pervasive; political repression that was modest compared to the practice of most of Jordan’s neighbors, but nonetheless persistent; and institutional dominance by a Jordanian intelligence establishment that was a valuable regional partner for the United States and less thuggish than in most of the region, but nonetheless troublesome. I’m sure I occasionally sanded the edges of my judgments. A lot was at stake for the United States in the transition from Hussein to Abdullah, and in a region where imperfections were relative and successes rare, I had no doubt of the value of our support.
In one cable at the beginning of 2000, I wrote, “If you had asked most Jordanians a year ago, as King Hussein lay dying, how their country would fare without him, few would have predicted the impressive achievements in economic reform and regional diplomacy of King Abdullah, whom they barely knew.” I added, without hyperbole, that Abdullah “has done more to reform the structure of the Jordanian economy in the last six months than Jordan did in the entire previous decade.” I was also quick to point out that the hard part was coming. I stressed that “if he is going to turn the promise and the glitter of his first year into enduring success in Jordan, the King will have to begin to show tangible results for structural economic reforms, start a process of opening up a sclerotic political system, and lay the basis for long-term protection of Jordanian interests in a region on the verge of some profound changes.”11
The wider region remained a snakepit, despite the king’s skill in navigating it. More than a decade before the Arab Spring, the social and economic forces building beneath the surface of the region were intensifying. In an April 2000 cable, I argued that “globalization, technological change and the expanding reach of independent media will only increase the pressures on the anachronistic, authoritarian regimes who dominate the Arab world—even ones as relatively tolerant and civil as the Hashemites.”12 On the immediate horizon were adversaries in the neighborhood, and troubles waiting to erupt. Two of the most obvious were Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, badly wounded in the Gulf War but still a deeply complicated problem for Jordan, and the fragile relationship between Israelis and Palestinians on the other side of the Jordan River.
EVER SINCE THE end of the Gulf War in the spring of 1991, the United States had been engaged in a frustrating effort to contain Saddam Hussein, protect the Kurds, and prevent Iraq from menacing its neighbors. The UN Security Council had authorized no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, which the United States policed at considerable expense. A UN inspection regime (UNSCOM) had been established to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that Saddam met his UNSC-mandated obligations to destroy any remaining infrastructure and stocks of weapons of mass destruction, as well as ballistic missiles with a range of more than ninety miles. Stringent economic sanctions remained in place to keep pressure on Saddam to comply.
Inevitably, this whole structure became increasingly difficult to manage. Early in President Clinton’s tenure, Saddam mounted an unsuccessful plot to assassinate former president Bush in Kuwait. Clinton retaliated with missile strikes against Iraq. As the years went by, Saddam episodically challenged U.S. aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones, and the United States responded. The Iraqis angered the Americans with their practice of “cheat and retreat” in dealing with UNSCOM—refusing access to sites for long periods, eventually offering limited concessions under pressure, and then repeating the whole maddening process. Saddam declared eight large compounds, containing more than a thousand buildings, to be presidential palaces, exempt from inspection. In December 1998, the United States launched Operation Desert Fox, a series of air and missile strikes against Iraqi targets, to punish Saddam for his intransigence.
Jordan was exposed on several fronts, leaving Abdullah with a nettlesome set of competing demands. It was heavily dependent on a concessional oil arrangement with Iraq, tacitly permitted by the United States and the UN Security Council, and increasingly squeezed as oil prices rose in the late 1990s. Iraq remained an important and irreplaceable market for cheap Jordanian goods, especially pharmaceuticals. Jordanian popular sympathies also remained strongly with the Iraqis, amplified by the human impact of sanctions and aggravated by broader antipathy toward American policy in the region.
King Abdullah had no illusions about Saddam. He continued the quiet practice of exchanging information about Iraq with the United States and supported our forces involved in the no-fly zones. But he couldn’t afford the economic or domestic political consequences of outright opposition to Saddam. The Gulf Arabs might have eased his calculus by substituting concessional oil for the Iraqi arrangement, but whether for reasons of lingering animus toward Jordan’s position in the Gulf War or inertia never followed through. Abdullah was in a bind.
His own encounters over the years with the Iraqi leadership had been dispiriting, and often bizarre. King Abdullah once told me about an especially strange encounter. Some years before, in the late 1980s, King Hussein sent Abdullah and his younger brother, Prince Faisal, to Baghdad to get acquainted with Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein. Uday, then still in his twenties, had not yet achieved the notoriety of his later years, when he regularly showed off the pet lions in his Baghdad palace, beat the members of the Iraqi national soccer team when they lost matches, and kidnapped and raped female Iraqi university students who caught his eye. Qusay was less visibly thuggish, but already developing a reputation as his father’s son when it came to cunning brutality.
On the second day of the visit, their hosts took Abdullah and Faisal for a boat ride on a large man-made lake outside Baghdad. Expecting a quiet afternoon, both were more than a little shocked when Uday—always the thrill seeker—pulled out an RPG and fired it just ahead of his own security patrol a few dozen yards away. No one was hurt, but Uday didn’t seem at all bothered by the prospect, acting as if this were just another way to spend an afternoon. Abdullah and Faisal were horrified. As Abdullah put it, “There are many people in my generation of leaders in the region with whom I already have a good rapport—but Uday is not one of them.”13
After Abdullah became king, he grew increasingly anxious about the direction of American policy toward Iraq. He was skeptical that the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton late in the autumn of 1998, represented anything more than wishful thinking. The ILA stated explicitly that it was the goal of the United States to change the regime in Baghdad, but Abdullah saw no compelling strategy behind the rhetoric—and a lot of risk for Jordan along the way. He thought many of those most prominent in the exiled Iraqi opposition movement were frauds, or at best naïve. He was particularly caustic about Ahmed Chalabi, who had been run out of Jordan a decade before as head of a prominent local bank, following allegations of embezzlement.
As he emphasized to me with mounting concern in 1999 and 2000, the king saw Western sanctions policy as self-defeating. Saddam had successfully manipulated the UN’s Oil for Food Program, aimed at easing the plight of ordinary Iraqis, to tighten his own grip on power. By late 2000, Abdullah told me that “it’s more likely that Saddam will be killed by a meteor than that sanctions will undermine him.”14
By the end of the Clinton administration, the king was arguing consistently that the United States was helping, not hurting, Saddam, allowing him to play the victim and exploit an increasingly tense regional situation. He maintained that Washington should abandon economic or civilian sanctions, and instead intensify measures prohibiting the import of military or dual-use items. These so-called smart sanctions had obvious drawbacks, since Saddam could exploit the revenue from unrestricted oil sales to solidify his regime, but Abdullah’s argument was that he was more or less doing this anyway, and the United States needed to regain the initiative. It was certainly a self-serving position for Jordan, but that didn’t make it wrong.
AS JORDAN’S CHALLENGE to the east became more worrisome, its dilemma to the west grew larger too. In that same conversation in Aqaba in late 2000 about Iraqi sanctions, the king expressed mounting concern about the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising that had been triggered by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount several weeks earlier. As he pointed out, Saddam was using the ugly spectacle in the West Bank to divert attention and pressure, and to fan regional animus toward American policy. Jordan was stuck in the middle, politically and physically. I cabled Washington later that day, restating the glaringly obvious: “It is important to take a step back and look soberly at the collateral damage that the unfolding tragedy across the river could do to relatively moderate countries like Jordan, which are not exactly a growth industry in this region these days.”15
When King Abdullah took the throne, things had looked more positive across the river. The Wye agreement, which his father had so heroically inspired, was the latest incremental step toward the two-state solution envisioned by the Oslo Accords of 1993. Progress had been painful and halting, but by the beginning of 1999 the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, exerted some degree of control over 40 percent of the West Bank, and most of Gaza. In May of that year, Labor’s Ehud Barak won the Israeli elections and ousted Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu, a leader in whom neither Abdullah nor his father had had much faith.
Early in Barak’s tenure, a new target of September 2000 was set for completion of negotiations about the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza, the latest in a series of moving goalposts since Oslo. Barak decided, however, to concentrate first on negotiations with Syria. He disliked the incrementalism of the Oslo process, which he thought maximized domestic political cost in Israel for minimal strategic gains. The Syria track offered a chance to produce a big strategic reward, removing the more serious security threat posed by the Assad regime, as well as building leverage on Arafat in subsequent negotiations. With Hafez al-Assad’s health a growing question mark, Barak felt a sense of urgency to test the possibility of an agreement with Syria.
Not surprisingly, the Palestinians were upset by Barak’s sense of priorities. They had been negotiating for years, and had made clear their commitment to reaching an agreement. Assad, who had not budged an inch, was being rewarded with Israeli attention. King Abdullah was nervous too. While he was supportive of an Israeli-Syrian deal, it was a two-state solution that mattered most to Jordan’s future. Establishment of a sovereign Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza would cement a sense of Jordanian national identity on the other side of the Jordan River, solidifying the unity of both East Bank Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian origin that Abdullah’s father had worked for nearly half a century to accomplish. It also promised economic opportunities for Jordan beyond the thus far meager results of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of 1994. Nevertheless, Abdullah did what he could to support Syrian-Israeli negotiations, in hopes that a breakthrough there would accelerate Israeli-Palestinian progress.
Abdullah traveled to Damascus in April 1999, two months after Assad’s unexpected appearance at King Hussein’s funeral. Assad was relatively upbeat about improving relations with Jordan, including on the thorny issue of water resources, where Syria held the high cards through its control of the headwaters of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers. Abdullah also spent substantial time on that trip with Assad’s son and heir apparent, Bashar. On the surface, Abdullah and Bashar seemed to share a few traits. Both were in their thirties, part of a new generation of Arab leaders. Both had the experience of unexpected elevations, Bashar when his elder brother Basil died in a car crash, and Abdullah when his father changed the line of succession on his deathbed. And both thought of themselves as modernizers, although Bashar’s self-image was thinly drawn, the product of a year in London studying ophthalmology and his role as head of the Syrian Computer Society, as close to a hotbed of innovation as the deeply repressive Assad regime permitted.
Bashar took the king to the Alawite stronghold of Latakia on the Mediterranean, and drove him around the city for several hours while they talked about the region and the world. The king was a little bemused by Bashar’s apparent naïveté; he asked Abdullah at one point what jet lag felt like, explaining that the longest flights he had ever taken were to London and back. The king said, however, that he thought Bashar might be capable of breaking out of some of his father’s knuckle-dragging habits, and following through on any progress that might be made with the Israelis. Years later, the king ruefully acknowledged to me, “So much for first impressions.”
In January 2000, the United States hosted Israeli and Syrian delegations at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Barak led the Israeli team. The Syrian delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa, whose demeanor hadn’t grown much more flexible or conciliatory in the decade since he had strained Jim Baker’s patience at Madrid. The talks sputtered over nearly ten days with no breakthrough. In a final, high-stakes effort to reach a deal, Clinton met in Geneva in late March with a fast-failing Hafez al-Assad. Unconvinced that Barak would ever deliver the full return of Syrian territory occupied since the 1967 war, Assad refused to authorize the resumption of negotiations with the Israelis. The Syria track had run its course.
Barak and Clinton then turned to the Palestinian talks with renewed focus. Prodded by Barak, and hoping to cap his presidency with a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, Clinton decided to invite Arafat and Barak to Camp David, the scene of Jimmy Carter’s dramatic success with Sadat and Begin more than twenty years earlier. It was a significant gamble. The Israelis and Palestinians were far apart on how much of the West Bank would be returned, and even further apart on the questions of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return. Arafat feared that he would be blamed for a breakdown in talks, and knew how deep disillusionment already ran among Palestinians after all the unmet expectations of the Oslo years. Never a diplomatic risk-taker, Arafat came to Camp David with great reluctance, drawn largely by the investment he had made in Clinton and American leadership, and always confident that he could wriggle out of any tight political situation if he had to.
For King Abdullah, this was a difficult juncture. In barely two years on the throne, he knew that he couldn’t replicate the influence or prestige of his father, but he understood instinctively the importance of Jordan’s unique position, enjoying healthy relations with all three key players—Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans. He found the Camp David experience frustrating. For reasons that were partly understandable but also partly mistaken, the U.S. team at Camp David kept a tight lid over the more than two weeks of intense negotiations at the secluded presidential retreat. Key Arab players who might have helped encourage Arafat became an afterthought, and when they were consulted it was often with only the skimpiest of background.
On one occasion late in the talks, for example, a senior American official at Camp David placed a call to the king to ask for his help in persuading the Palestinians to show more flexibility on Jerusalem, but never provided any context on what exactly we were hoping to achieve, or what had transpired so far. Much to my embarrassment, I wasn’t any more successful in eliciting better information for the king. My concerns, however, were insignificant compared to the central dilemma: Despite herculean efforts by President Clinton, and unprecedented progress on the question of territory and the even more complex question of Jerusalem, the two sides were at an impasse. Camp David had come further than any previous effort but ultimately ended with no agreement and plenty of resentments.
Despite earlier promises to the Palestinians, the United States—attuned more to Barak’s worsening domestic political predicament—appeared in the wake of Camp David to blame Arafat for the summit’s failure. With popular Palestinian anger rising, Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in late September set off a political firestorm, and in the ensuing violence a new Palestinian uprising was born. I accompanied King Abdullah to a meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh, where President Mubarak invited Barak, Arafat, and Clinton to try to find a way to ease the violence. It proved fruitless. The Israelis were intent upon driving home to the Palestinians that violence wouldn’t produce any positive political results, and often responded with disproportionate force; Arafat, always sensitive to the popular mood and never shy about indulging in violence if it helped keep his position as political ringmaster intact, often played a double game.
Our ambassador to Egypt, Dan Kurtzer, and I were deeply concerned about where all of this was headed. Over the next few months, we took the unusual step of sending joint messages to Washington. We felt a responsibility to inject our perspective into the negotiating process from the outside, if we could not provide our views from the inside. In December, we sent the third and final message:
As seen from Cairo and Amman, U.S. policy in the peace process and our overall posture in the region are still heading in exactly the wrong direction. With our interests under increasing scrutiny and attack, we are acting passively, reactively and defensively. There is no guarantee that a bolder, more activist American approach will stop the hemorrhaging—but it seems clear to us that things could get a lot worse unless we regain the initiative.
Our stake in reversing the drift toward more violence, rebuilding American credibility, refocusing attention on the possibilities of a political process, and getting as far as we can over the next seven weeks toward a framework agreement is self-evident. What is less obvious is how to get from here to there. One option is to follow Barak’s lead. That may serve what he sees to be his tactical interests at this point. But it’s hard to see how it serves ours. A second option is to see if we can extract from the Palestinians a clearer sense of how far they’re prepared to go right now, and then use that to craft an approach to Barak. But it’s unlikely that Arafat will level with us at this point; and while recent Egyptian and Jordanian efforts with the Palestinians have been helpful, it’s not at all clear that they will produce a workable starting point.
That leaves it to us to lay out the hard truths—for all parties—that must underpin any enduring political solution. As we have tried to emphasize in our two previous telegrams, that will require the political will to stand up for what we have fought so hard for over the past eight years, and a readiness to declare the independence of our policy.16
The central recommendation we made was to “articulate a ‘Clinton Vision’ for the peace process.” We argued that “we have a unique but wasting opportunity to take advantage of a remarkable asset: the personal reputation and demonstrated commitment of President Clinton. He has built up substantial personal credit with the parties over the years, and now is the time to use it. He can sketch a vision of what he believes a comprehensive peace will require of all parties—Palestinians, Israelis, and Arab states alike. He will have to be willing to say things to each party that they will not want to hear, but that is the definition of a balanced and credible approach.”
Neither the White House nor the State Department probably needed our cable to convince them to produce what became the “Clinton Parameters”—a groundbreaking American proposal for a comprehensive two-state solution that was presented to the parties in late December and made public the following month, shortly before President Clinton left office. It was too late, however, with Clinton’s term ending and the parties drifting further apart. Violence quickly consumed nearly a decade of political progress.
KING ABDULLAH, LIKE the rest of us, was worried about the stalemate in diplomacy and the worsening of Palestinian-Israeli violence. In a long conversation one afternoon in January 2001, he told me, “I’m generally an optimistic person, but now I’m worried. This region is drifting in a scary direction. People are getting angrier, and I don’t have any good answers.”17 I didn’t have much reassurance to offer. In a cable a couple months later, I reported more troubling indicators: “The mood amongst Jordanians is increasingly angry and disaffected—a mixture of intense frustration over rising violence across the Jordan River, fury at American policies that are seen to be not just unbalanced but aggressively anti-Arab, and discontent with the meager practical results of economic reform.”18
After nearly three years as ambassador, I was worried too—not about Abdullah’s leadership, but about the pressures that Jordan faced, and the inevitable uncertainties about the new administration’s policies. These uncertainties took on particular significance for me when President Bush’s new secretary of state, Colin Powell, called me a week or so after he was named to ask if I would serve as assistant secretary for near eastern affairs.
I had never worked for anyone I respected more than Powell, and I was thrilled by what his leadership would bring to American foreign policy. I had similar respect for Rich Armitage, who had been nominated as deputy secretary of state. I was confident in my knowledge of the region, and familiar with the main policy issues; I was far less confident in my ability to rise to the leadership and management challenge of heading one of the department’s largest bureaus. I was just as unsure about the new administration’s Middle East policy and feared we were sailing into even more treacherous waters in that troubled part of the world.
It was hard to say no to Colin Powell, however, or to a request to serve in such a critical post at such a critical time. I quickly accepted, asking only that we stay in Jordan until as close to the end of the school year as possible (which, given the vagaries of the Senate confirmation process, was a probability anyway), and that I be able to choose my deputies in the NEA front office.
I had learned over the years that the key to success in any demanding job is to surround yourself with people who are smarter and more experienced than you are. That’s exactly what I did in NEA, working the phones hard from Amman in early 2001 to enlist three of the most capable Arabists I knew, all of whom were serving, like me, as ambassadors in the field. Jim Larocco, ambassador in Kuwait, agreed to come back to Washington as principal deputy assistant secretary. David Satterfield, our ambassador in Beirut, with whom I had worked many years before as lowly staff assistants for Dick Murphy, also readily agreed. Ryan Crocker, leading our embassy in Damascus, was the toughest sell. One of the best officers I had ever known, Ryan far preferred the dangers and challenges of the Middle East to the petty intrigues and bureaucratic machinations of Washington. He eventually relented, calling me from Damascus one afternoon, after I had nearly given up. “I’ll join you at the Alamo,” he said in his usual laconic way.
I was confirmed by the Senate in April, and began my new job immediately. The king and queen invited Lisa and me to Aqaba for the weekend, just before we left. It had been a remarkable three years, and I told the king how glad I was to have had the chance to work with him, and how much Jordan would always mean to me and my family.
“Neither of us expected all the things that have been thrown at us,” he said. “I’m proud of what we’ve done together. You should be too.”