Interview with His Majesty King Abdullah II
“What We Have Today Is Better”
Above the fireplace in King Abdullah's living room is a portrait of his father in a crisp white military uniform, a radiant image that belies the gritty reality the late King Hussein faced nearly every day of his life.
As young Abdullah talked with me yesterday at his home, he was dressed in a sleeveless knit sport shirt, looking younger than his 41 years. These images of father and son are a reminder that the Middle East really is changing.
We've all talked about it long enough, but now it's finally happening. US troops are a few hundred miles away in Iraq, pounding the last remnants of a regime that haunted (and, for a time, seduced) King Hussein. A new Palestinian prime minister has edged aside Yasser Arafat, the conniving PLO leader who nearly toppled the Jordanian king in 1970.
Peace isn't exactly at hand, but we have Ariel Sharon, a famously hawkish Israeli prime minister, talking about the creation of a Palestinian state, bulldozing Israeli settlements and speaking of the West Bank as “occupied” territory. That must make the “plucky little king” smile, wherever he is now.
And at the Dead Sea this weekend, Abdullah is hosting a gathering of the world's great and good, known as the World Economic Forum and devoted to the idea of reconciliation in the Middle East post-Saddam Hussein. The watchword for this session is that democratic change is inevitable -- meaning that either countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia get their acts together or their rulers will end up like Saddam.
You can see the lights of Jerusalem twinkling across the water in the evening. And Israeli guests wander among Arabs, chatting about the region's future.
What's wrong with this happy picture? Well, nearly every element of it could go wrong, for starters. America could be up the creek in Iraq, the new “roadmap” could crumble in the face of Hamas/Likud rejectionism, and Saudi and Egyptian leaders could keep talking democracy even as they fire newspaper editors and professors who practice it.
But listening to Abdullah, you think people might actually avoid blowing the opportunities of this fragile moment for change. What encourages me most is his frank willingness to criticise the Bush administration, which conveys a basic confidence that things will turn out all right, starting in Iraq.
What's great, says the king, is that “an oppressive regime was removed” and “there's now a hope that the average Iraqi will have a say in his future.”
The Americans have made mistakes in Iraq, he says. They underestimated the need for basic services, such as police protection. In what Abdullah describes as their “naivete,” the Americans also failed to appreciate the intra-Shiite rivalry in such cities as Karbala and Najaf and the resulting tension it would cause.
And with Sandhurst-trained understatement, he says: “I must say that I had my reservations when I heard the Iraqi armed forces were disbanded, simply because you have people who need the salary at the end of the day to get food on the table for their children.”
But even on these vexing issues, things may soon be looking up. Abdullah says he is probably willing to provide Jordanian police to train a new Iraqi police force and for a time have them conduct joint patrols in some areas. That would be a huge boost to Iraq's sense of security.
Meanwhile, sources close to the US civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, say he is planning to begin recruiting the first brigade of a new Iraqi army on July 15. The total military will eventually number about 40,000 -- less than a tenth of Saddam's army. And in mid-July, Bremer will finish his interviews and select 25 to 30 members of a new Iraqi political council that will appoint cabinet ministers and establish committees on key constitutional issues. Iraq will be on its way to having a government again.
It's hardly a perfect world -- especially when you look across the Dead Sea and think about the bloody Israeli-Palestinian standoff. But I remind Abdullah of a comment he made last July, when he asked the still-undecided President Bush about Iraq: “Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” Does he wish now that he had succeeded and won time for more negotiations?
“What we have today is better,” the king says simply. And the interesting fact is that for all the fretting and moaning about the Middle East, it would be hard to find anyone here who would disagree.
