I said, “If this is going to risk the life of Jordanians, forget diplomatic immunity. Go arrest them, right now.” The intelligence services burst into Iraqi embassy housing and grabbed the military attaché and two of his accomplices. This created an uproar. The public did not know the evidence that we had seen of what the Iraqi regime was planning, and many were critical, saying, “How could you break into embassy property and arrest Iraqi diplomats?” I told them to trust me, that I was acting on the basis of good information and that Jordanian lives were in danger.
The next day the Iraqi ambassador came to see me. He was furious. “I’ve got a message from Saddam,” he said. “He’s really upset that you’ve done this.”
“I am quite willing to come out publicly and say that I’ve arrested these three people because they were plotting to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Jordanians,” I said. “I am looking beyond the war, Your Excellency. I don’t want to have to say anything now that would destroy the long-term relationship between Iraq and the Jordanian people. So please send this message back to Saddam: if this is how you want to do it, I will publicly reveal how your regime is trying to kill Jordanian civilians.” The ambassador—to his credit—came back to me and assured me that he had sent my message back to Baghdad. “Problem solved,” he said. The ambassador had told his Foreign Ministry that they had made a mess and that we would go public and cause an international incident if they continued to pursue it. So the issue died. We expelled the three men to Baghdad, and accusations from the Iraqi government stopped. At this point, they had more pressing concerns.
On March 28, after Friday prayers, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Jordan to protest the Iraq War. In Amman, a crowd of eight hundred people gathered near the Israeli embassy, chanting, “Our beloved Saddam, use your chemical weapons on the invaders!” They then tried to march on the embassy a few streets away, but the crowd was dispersed by Jordanian riot police, who fired live rounds over their heads.
Many of the demonstrators viewed the war as the West attacking the Arab and Muslim world, continuing a long history of violent Western interaction with our region. This perception had been strengthened when, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush referred to a “crusade” against terrorism. This unfortunate choice of words awakened in many Arabs memories of the violent invasions of the Middle Ages, and the Crusaders’ bloody seizure of Jerusalem. Now, hundreds of years later, a Western army had again entered an Arab land. Some also believed that the United States was acting under the influence of Israel to destroy a strong Arab country, while the more cynical suspected that it wanted to replace Iraq’s leader with somebody more friendly toward American oil companies.
Three days later a group of ninety-nine prominent Jordanians, including four former prime ministers, tried to ride this wave of public opinion and demanded that Jordan support Saddam in the war and do things I knew, and they knew, would not be in our national interests. However popular such rhetoric might be domestically, I did not have the luxury of making my decisions based on emotions. I had to look to the future and to Jordan’s national interests once the fighting stopped. From my knowledge of Iraqi and Western forces, I thought it would be a pretty one-sided fight and would be over quickly. But others in Jordan were less certain.
The U.S. and British forces had some quick military successes, taking the southern town of Basra a few days into the conflict. But then the media, especially Arab satellite TV channels, began to report that they were facing difficulties. Their analysis was so convincing, bringing in retired generals to analyze the war’s progress, that a lot of people, including many politicians, began to think the war would last a very long time, and even that Iraq had the upper hand. A week into the war, the U.S. advance on Baghdad was hampered by terrible dust storms. My wife had been watching television, which was reporting that the war was going badly for the Americans. But I knew that you did not get a good sense of a war from watching satellite television. I had traveled to Baghdad with my father before the first Gulf War and knew how the Iraqi regime had a tendency to overestimate its own military capabilities. I knew that the Iraqi army was no match for the United States and its allies, given their superior resources and military capabilities.
On April 9, U.S. forces captured Baghdad, and the world watched live as jubilant Iraqis toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. I felt a mixture of both sadness at the needless death and suffering the war had caused and hope as I looked at the many Iraqis celebrating the promise of a better future. When the statue fell, it was like a switch had been thrown across the Arab world. The images flashed on TV from the Arabian Gulf to Morocco and around the world. Even before it hit the ground, my phone began ringing. On the other end were many of the ninety-nine prominent Jordanians who had questioned our position. They were calling to congratulate me on “my wisdom and judgment” in keeping Jordan out of the conflict. “We knew Saddam would not last,” they said. “We were with you all along.” I was amazed how easily some of the elite would change their colors to win favor.
I was sure that the United States and its allies would win the war, but I had no idea how badly they would handle its aftermath.
Chapter 20
“We Will Be Greeted as Liberators”
C
onventional wisdom in Washington held that removing Saddam Hussein and imposing a new Iraqi government would be as simple as replacing a lightbulb. In an interview shortly before the war, Vice President Dick Cheney said:
I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.... The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
Once the war ended, this rosy view began to look more and more misguided. “It’s going to be a bloodbath,” I had told my friends in America. In my conversations with friends in the region, we almost universally shared a sense of foreboding about the aftermath of the war in Iraq. I remember several conversations with Egyptian president Mubarak in which we both expressed concerns that the invasion would lead to unforeseen negative consequences that we would be dealing with for decades.
In June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, Jordan hosted a meeting of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea, and during the conference I met L. Paul Bremer, the newly appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the interim Iraqi government established by the United States. The previous month, on arriving in Baghdad, Bremer had issued two now infamous orders: to pursue an aggressive de-Baathification policy, and to dissolve the Iraqi army.
I pleaded with Bremer not to dissolve the army, and warned him that it would blow up in all of our faces. I told him that I understood the rationale behind the process of de-Baathification, but that it needed to apply only to those at the top with blood on their hands. To be a taxi driver or a teacher in Saddam’s Iraq, you had to be a member of the Baath Party. I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill.
The army was one of the only functioning institutions inside Iraq. Together with other security networks, it guaranteed Saddam’s survival. But it was also in large part responsible for social stability. Disbanding it was crazy—like deciding to fire all the cops, firefighters, and ambulance drivers in New York City all at once because you do not like the mayor. You would have hundreds of thousands of people with military training and access to small arms and explosives, sitting at home with no jobs in a desperately poor and brutalized country that had just come through a war. Baathists, feeling vulnerable, would organize and strike back. How would these people feed their families? It was a recipe for anarchy and chaos.
“I know what I’m doing,” Bremer said brusquely. “There’s going to be some sort of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank you very much.”
But despite Bremer’s supreme confidence, things started to fall apart quickly. The Sunnis felt isolated and threatened, because they believed they were being shut out of the new Iraqi government. They started organizing military operations against coalition forces. At the same time, ideologically motivated Iraqi Islamists opened the door for foreign Arab jihadists. If anybody rejoiced at the chaos in Iraq after the American invasion, it was Al Qaeda, as they quickly realized that they could shift their operations from Afghanistan into the heart of the Arab world.
Although it is hard to determine the origin of these two policies—Bremer denied responsibility in his memoir and said they came from the White House—I believe the ideas originated from the Iraqi émigré politician Ahmad Chalabi and his supporters. When he lived in Jordan in the 1970s and 1980s, Chalabi was an active businessman and a close friend of Crown Prince Hassan. One of his most notorious ventures was the Petra Bank, founded in Jordan in 1977. In the late 1980s, the Petra Bank ran into financial trouble, and the government began to investigate, suspecting financial fraud. Investigators believed that Chalabi had been illegally taking funds from the bank. When they began closing in on him in 1989, he smuggled himself out of the country to Syria. He was tried in absentia and in 1992 was convicted of embezzling $70 million and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. There is still an active warrant for his arrest in Jordan. After he left, his name was connected with the controversy surrounding the collapse of a Lebanese bank and a financial institution in Switzerland.
After an unsuccessful career as a businessman, Chalabi tried his hand at politics. During the 1990s he was one of the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, the main opposition group dedicated to toppling Saddam Hussein. He was supported by the Clinton administration, and also became close to neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. When Bush came to office in 2001, Chalabi increased his efforts to push his ideas for influence and cash. He is said to have secured substantial amounts of both from the U.S. State and Defense departments.
I warned President Bush about Chalabi when I saw him in 2002, telling him that he was the worst person possible to be giving advice to the United States. Bush said that he would “deal with Chalabi.” But Chalabi’s star continued to rise.
Chalabi’s grandiose schemes may have been popular in Washington, but on the ground in Baghdad, a grim reality began to take hold. As one of the first Arab countries to reopen our embassy in Iraq, Jordan was soon drawn into the chaos. On August 7, 2003, a truck pulled up outside our embassy. As the driver walked away, the truck exploded, killing at least seventeen Iraqi civilians. None of our embassy staff were killed. Later investigation showed this to be a strike by the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would later become the leader of a new group called Al Qaeda in Iraq. In pursuit of a wider goal, Zarqawi and his followers wanted to ride on a tide of violence and brutality, and struck at Jordan to discourage others from helping the nascent Iraqi government.
The looming chaos in post-invasion Iraq called for a coordinated approach by all of its neighbors. And one neighbor in particular was positioning itself to play a dominant role in Iraq’s future. In early September 2003, I traveled to Tehran to meet with the Iranian leadership. This was the first trip to Iran by a Jordanian head of state since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. My father had been close to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and I remember visiting Tehran as a young teenager. We went to a holiday camp on the Caspian and explored the resort island of Kish, in the Arabian Gulf.
I remembered Tehran from my childhood as a grand imperial city, edged by mountains like Amman, but as I drove into the city in 2003 I found it looking a bit run-down. Little seemed to have changed since the revolution. I met Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami, at the Sadabad Palace northeast of the capital, and after inspecting the honor guard and the requisite formalities, we began to discuss business. Khatami was quite relaxed and jovial. He pointed to his defense minister, who was an Arab Iranian, and said jokingly, “This fellow is an Arab; we have to keep a close eye on him.” We discussed possible areas of economic and cultural cooperation between Iran and Jordan. After the meeting was over, he took me on a tour of the Iranian defense industry.
The Iranians did have some serious business to conduct. Some Iranian officials wanted to reach out to the Americans and knew I would shortly be going on a scheduled visit to Washington. So they asked me to act as an intermediary. They said they wanted to discuss cooperation over the future of Iraq. They also said they were holding under house arrest or some kind of detention around sixty to seventy Al Qaeda members who had escaped from Afghanistan into Iran. They asked me to tell the Americans that they were ready to talk about handing over these individuals to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. They were also prepared to discuss their nuclear program, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I agreed to relay the message to President Bush.
The morning after my meeting with Khatami, I met with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the most powerful man in Iran. We pulled up to a walled compound and were handed over by our escort to the supreme leader’s personal guard. Unsmiling, serious, and barefoot inside the compound, they led us to the room where we would meet Khamenei. In contrast to the grandeur of Sadabad Palace, the supreme leader’s residence was austere, with a simple table and chairs and a few carpets.
While President Khatami had been open and friendly, Khamenei was reserved. “Welcome to Iran,” he said as we shook hands. “As a Hashemite, you are very important in our branch of Islam.”