Part 3 (1/2)
The Iraqi leaders.h.i.+p was isolated from the wider world, and as can often be the case in dictators.h.i.+ps, n.o.body wanted to tell the leader that his ideas were faulty. So Saddam's sons had a greatly overinflated-and unrealistic-perception of their military strength.
”We can detect their stealth bombers!” Qusay said triumphantly. ”Morale is very high; we want war.” Both men went on to tell me about new types of artillery they had developed, secret radar systems and 20,000-pound bombs. None of it made much sense.
”I'm telling you,” I said, ”from what I learned in England, you guys don't stand a chance.” They did not react. They had tremendous national pride but had badly underestimated the capabilities of their adversary. It was the kind of hubris that can (and soon did) cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Shortly after our conversation, my father emerged from the conference hall looking upbeat, and we returned to Amman. The next day, on December 6, 1990, Saddam announced that he would free the hostages. But the preparations for war rumbled on.
Around the New Year, I regularly get together with a group of close friends from the United States and other countries-it has become an annual tradition. That year, given the likelihood of an imminent war on our border, I was not sure any of my friends from outside Jordan would want to come.
As my family and I tried to retain a semblance of normalcy, I could see that my father was exhausted; he was on the phone all day with the Americans, Saddam Hussein, and the Kuwaitis, trying desperately to talk them back from the brink. A few friends and I decided we would try to lift his spirits. We searched through my father's house at Hummar, and inside an old chest we found a collection of photographs of my father with Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser, the British general Sir John Glubb, and many other historic figures. My father looked through the photos while the family gathered around. He gave us an impromptu history lesson, describing what was going on in Jordan at the time each photograph was taken and telling us about these historical figures, their personalities, and the various conflicts he had lived through.
On New Year's Eve that year I was in the Jordan Valley with my friend Gig, who came to visit along with some other American friends despite the protests at home. We talked about our families and the old days back at Deerfield, but most of our conversation focused on the impending war with Iraq and what it might mean for Jordan. If things went badly, would Jordan become the enemy in American eyes? The U.S. Army's 229th Squadron of the 101st Airborne Division, where I had learned to fly Cobra helicopters, had been deployed to Iraq, and it was shocking to think that we might soon be on opposite sides. I was a Jordanian and Gig was an American, but our friends.h.i.+p was stronger than politics.
By January 1991, over half a million troops from a coalition led by the United States and the UK, joined by some thirty other countries, were deployed in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf. Opposing them was Saddam's army, at around a million strong the largest in the region and the fourth largest in the world. Iraq had obtained weapon systems from all over the world and had been battle-hardened by its long war with Iran, so it was by no means sure that the impending conflict would be a walkover for the Americans.
We were concerned that we could be dragged into the war by either the Israelis or the Iraqis. It was possible that Israeli jets would try to fly over Jordanian airs.p.a.ce to attack Iraq, as Saddam had rhetorically tied his action to the support of Palestine, a common battle cry that still rings throughout the region today. It was equally possible that Iraqi troops would enter Jordan to attack Israel. My father told Saddam, ”If one Iraqi soldier steps over the border, we are at war.” He conveyed the same message to Israel: if one Israeli fighter flew across Jordanian territory to attack Iraq, it would mean war.
On January 16, 1991, the coalition war on Iraq started. As this was a time of national emergency, my father asked me to be on standby to deploy with the 2nd Battalion of the 40th Armoured Brigade near the border with Israel. A few nights before the fighting started, I was sent one evening to carry out an inspection of a unit keeping guard on the lower Jordan Valley border, down by the Dead Sea. It was the kind of night you find only out in the desert, with a faint light coming from the pale moon overhead. Because there is so little man-made light in the desert, you see many more stars than you do in a city. It feels like you are standing on the edge of the universe, looking in.
Suddenly the darkness was broken by a flash of light as an Iraqi Scud missile blazed across the sky, heading for Israel.
Our air force was on high alert. We worried that the Iraqi air force might try to flee to Jordan. As it turned out, they had gone to Iran to avoid the coalition fighters, and the Israelis held their fire.
Saddam's army was no match for the coalition forces, and six weeks after the war started it was over. From my knowledge of NATO tactics and of the firepower of the U.S. and British militaries, I knew there could be only one outcome, but even I was surprised at just how quickly the Iraqi army was defeated.
There was no love lost between my father and Saddam Hussein. My father was all too aware of the suffering Iraqi forces had imposed on Kuwaitis. But he also wanted to avoid what he believed to be the unnecessary suffering the war would inflict on the Iraqi people. Many Gulf states, including Kuwait, were unable to accept that my father was acting as a mediator seeking to avoid war, and they accused him of siding with Saddam. He was hurt by this. He felt his old allies should have trusted him more and appreciated that he was trying to act in everyone's best interests. Relations between Jordan and Kuwait remained strained for years, and our relations with other Gulf states deteriorated after the war. The resulting loss of financial a.s.sistance, of oil from Iraq, Jordan's main source of supply, and of remittances from Jordanians working in the Gulf, as many of them lost their jobs and were forced to return home, would together inflict severe harm on the economy.
All of us in the region were deeply saddened by the death and destruction that the Gulf War wrought. And perhaps that was a reason why some began to search more vigorously for peace with our other neighbor, Israel.
Following the end of the cold war and with Iraq out of Kuwait, the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1991 convened a peace conference in Madrid. The peace talks, which became known as the Madrid Peace Conference, represented a landmark breakthrough in the long history of efforts by moderate Arab states and the international community to resolve the wider Arab-Israeli conflict and negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. This was the first time that all Arab parties, including the Palestinians, had gathered to address their differences in a mediated forum. The Madrid process, in its bilateral and multilateral forums, revitalized the stalled peace efforts. As the Israelis said that they were not yet ready to negotiate directly with the Palestinians, Jordan offered a means for them to speak with the Israelis under a ”Jordanian umbrella” in a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The goal of the process launched in Madrid was a comprehensive regional peace, and at the beginning of November, Israel began talks with its Arab neighbors on four separate bilateral tracks, with Jordan, the Palestinians, Lebanon, and Syria.
The implicit understanding among the Arab states was that they would maintain a united front to preserve the interests of the Palestinians, rather than each negotiating on the basis of its own interests. To do this, they agreed to coordinate their positions and keep each other informed of their progress.
But without my father's knowledge, Israel and the PLO began parallel secret talks in Oslo, Norway, and after eight months unexpectedly reached a historic breakthrough agreement that came to be known as the Oslo Accords. This agreement, which established mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and self-government for the Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho, represented a turning point in Israeli-Palestinian relations. It established the framework for a final peace agreement and set up stages for its implementation. The Declaration of Principles was signed in Was.h.i.+ngton in September 1993 by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Ya.s.ser Arafat in a ceremony at the White House hosted by President Bill Clinton.
My father was angered that Arafat had not informed him of the Oslo channel and that he had made a separate peace with Israel. ”I can't believe they did this!” he said to me. He was also alarmed that the Syrians were more advanced in their talks than they had told us. Deeply disappointed that the Arabs had not been able to maintain their united front, my father focused more on Jordan's own peace negotiations with the Israelis.
Jordan had actually encouraged direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1988, when my father made the historic decision to sever Jordan's legal and administrative ties with the Israeli-occupied West Bank. When it was occupied by Israel in 1967, the West Bank was part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Palestinians in the West Bank were Jordanian citizens and the government in Amman had remained responsible for their affairs and for sustaining Palestinian schools, the judiciary, and other inst.i.tutions throughout the occupation. Civil servants in the West Bank were employees of the Jordanian government, even after 1967, and half of the seats in the parliament were allocated for the West Bank. The disengagement decision meant that Jordan would no longer be in charge of these inst.i.tutions. Only its responsibility for the holy sites was excluded from the decision. My father felt that were he to relinquish his responsibility for the holy sites in Jerusalem, a vacuum would be created that Israel would use to a.s.sume control of the sites. So he held on to this responsibility, which was later recognized by Israel in the peace treaty it signed with Jordan in 1994.
My father's formal break with the West Bank meant that the Palestinians could a.s.sume responsibility for their own political future in the Occupied Territories. In an address to the nation on July 31, he said that he believed this was the logical response to the conclusion of the Rabat Summit of 1974, when all Arab states had decided to designate the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The decision was also prompted by many failed attempts to coordinate strategy with the PLO and by the outbreak in December 1987 of civil revolt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip against Israel's occupation-the first Palestinian intifada. Palestinians had made clear their intention to pursue their political aims independent of Jordan. My father was not going to stand in their way. His decision was crucial to Palestinian ambitions for statehood: the West Bank would now form the core of a future Palestinian state.
Another unintended consequence of the 1991 Gulf War was the flood of Iraqis into our country. Before, during, and after the war many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and people from other countries who had been living in Iraq sought refuge in Jordan. Most Jordanian and Palestinian expatriates in Kuwait also made their way back to Jordan. And although I did not know it at the time, a chance meeting with one of them would soon change my life.
Chapter 9.
A Royal Wedding In August 1992 I was a battalion commander of the 2nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment. We had been carrying out field exercises and my men and I had been camped out in the desert for two months straight, sleeping in tents. Our accommodations were pretty basic. To take a hot shower, I had rigged up a contraption with a storage tank that heated the water using the sun. The exercises went well, so the brigade commander told me and the other officers to take the night off.
I changed out of my army uniform, threw on a T-s.h.i.+rt and sneakers, and drove to Amman. I had just arrived home when my sister Aisha called, saying, ”I hear you're in town, come over for dinner.” I told her I really just wanted a proper shower and a comfy bed, but she had not seen me in some time and promised the get-together was not going to be anything fancy. I had been living on beans and tinned spaghetti for the last two months, so the prospect of a real dinner was too good to turn down.
I headed over to Aisha's house, my face like a lobster from weeks under the desert sun. Not realizing she was having guests over, I was still wearing the same clothes I had tossed on at the army camp. One of my sister's friends worked at Apple Computer in Amman, and he had brought along a colleague, Rania Al Ya.s.sin. As soon as I saw her, I thought, ”Wow!”
Nearly twenty-two at the time, Rania had not been in Jordan for long. She came from a Jordanian family of Palestinian origin and had grown up in Kuwait. She and her family had moved to Jordan during the Gulf War. Her father had long planned to retire in Jordan and had built a house in Amman, but the war sped up the family's plans.
After studying business at the American University in Cairo, Rania had worked at Citibank in Amman, and then at Apple, where she met my sister's friend. We spoke only briefly at the dinner, but I was struck by how poised, elegant, and intelligent she was. I was smitten and knew I had to see her again. It took me a little while to track her down, but I finally managed to get her number, and I called her at work. I introduced myself and said that I was hoping to see her again. ”I've heard things about you,” she said. She did not finish the sentence, but the implication was that what she had heard was not entirely favorable. ”I'm no angel,” I replied, ”but at least half the things you hear are just idle gossip.” She was not convinced and said she would need to think about it.
I would not be so easily dissuaded. I got a mutual friend, Tawfiq Kawar, to stop by her office and a.s.sure her of my good intentions. Rania was still not convinced; she thought he was not objective. Tawfiq returned from his mission saying that he had not secured a date for me, but he had found out that Rania liked chocolate. So I sent him back bearing a box of Belgian chocolates. After that, she accepted my invitation to dinner. It was November by the time she came to my house, and I decided to surprise her and cook.
I first learned to cook out of necessity in the army, but later I came to enjoy it. I find it a great way to relax and unwind. I had a j.a.panese teppanyaki table made locally, and an iron griddle on which I prepared traditional j.a.panese dishes of chicken, shrimp, and beef in the style of a Benihana restaurant. The meal went well, and we saw each other once or twice more before the end of the year, and talked many more times by phone. We had to be discreet. Amman is a town that loves to gossip, and neither one of us wanted to be the source of speculation.
Just after the beginning of the new year, I met up with Gig. By then I could no longer contain my excitement. I told him that I had met an amazing woman in Amman, and I thought she was the one.
My birthday was on January 30, and I invited Rania to the celebration. My father sat himself down next to her and they began to talk. He was stunned by her intelligence, charm, and beauty and did not take long to uncover our secret. After the guests had left, Rania and I were sitting in my house when the phone rang. It was my father, who loved to play matchmaker. ”So,” he said, ”when can I meet her parents?”
I used to do a lot of rally driving, including competing in professional events, and my co-driver Ali Bilbeisi and I even managed to take third place in the Jordan International Rally in 1986 and again in 1988. One of my favorite places was Tal Al Rumman, a mountain outside Amman where my father and some of his Lebanese friends in 1962 started a hill climb that is today one of the Middle East's longest-standing sporting events. I asked Rania if she would like to go for a drive with me, and we drove up to the top of the hill. I had hoped for a much more romantic proposal, but as we stood outside the car talking, I told her I thought our relations.h.i.+p was getting serious, and I could see us getting married. Rania looked back at me, smiled, and said nothing. Taking her silence as a.s.sent, I told my father about our conversation, and things began to move quickly after that.
A couple of weeks later we arranged for my father to visit her parents' house. I had been traveling on army business, and as I stepped off the plane at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, I saw my father standing at the gate. It was the first time I remember his meeting me at the airport. I think he just wanted to make sure I didn't get cold feet! Very much the romantic, he had for many years wanted me to marry and settle down.
In our culture, when a man wants to ask a woman to marry him, he gets the most powerful and influential members of his family or tribe to a.s.sure the intended bride's family that their daughter will be welcomed and well cared for. What better spokesman could you have to make your case than the King of Jordan? On the way to Rania's house, my father took a detour to his office, where he had some papers to sign. He kept me waiting for a good forty-five minutes. I was sweating, afraid we would be late.
When we arrived at the house, Rania's parents were expecting a casual meeting. They had no idea that my father intended to ask that day for their daughter's hand in marriage for me. They were gracious hosts, and her mother had prepared cookies, tea, and coffee. When she offered my father a cup of coffee, he took the cup, but did not drink it. In Jordan, when a man intends to ask for a woman's hand in marriage, it is traditional for the woman's family to offer a cup of Arabic coffee and for the man's family to refuse to drink it until the family has accepted the proposal. If her family turns down the marriage proposal, then that slight to the family honor is thought to be matched by the slight of not drinking the coffee. These days this is a ritual that is performed with everyone knowing their role. But in all of the rush, and even though Rania and I had spoken of marriage since I proposed to her, I had forgotten to inform her of the plan.
When my father refused to drink the coffee, Rania began to realize what was happening. But her poor mother had no idea what was wrong. She began urging my father to eat and drink. Finally, my father turned to Rania's father and made his case for why Rania and I would be a good match. I was so nervous that I can't remember much of what he said. But he must have been persuasive. Much to my relief, Rania's parents agreed, and finally my father drank their coffee. About a week later, on February 22, 1993, Rania and I formally announced our engagement.
That same month, I moved from commanding a battalion in the Armoured Corps, where I had spent most of my military career, to becoming deputy commander of Special Forces. In common with other elite army regiments like the U.S. Delta Force and the British Special Air Service, the Jordanian Special Forces had responsibility for counterterrorism operations and were trained to operate by land, air, and sea. One personal benefit of the move was that it was a headquarters appointment, so I was able to move from an army base to the family house in Amman. With our wedding fast approaching, I had little time to settle in.
My father wanted a grand occasion. He went so far as to fly in from London one of the organizers of the Royal Tournament, an annual military pageant that was at that time one of the largest in the world. Rania and I wanted a small wedding, so I began negotiating with my father. He was so excited that I knew I could never dissuade him. In the end, we agreed that he would arrange the formal event in the daytime and we would organize the evening entertainment.
June 10, 1993, was a sunny day in Amman, and crowds lined the streets, waving and throwing flowers. I wore my black military dress uniform, and Rania was resplendent in a flowing white satin dress with gold embroidery and a white veil. We were married in a simple ceremony in the afternoon at Zahran Palace in downtown Amman in front of family and a few friends. Zahran, which in Arabic means ”blooming flower,” was the home of my grandmother Queen Zein.
After the ceremony we drove through the streets of Amman in an open-top cream 1961 Lincoln convertible bedecked with white flowers, waving to the crowds. We drove slowly through town to Raghadan Palace, seat of the Royal Court, where my father had arranged the formal reception. Built by my great-grandfather King Abdullah I, the founder of modern Jordan, on a hill overlooking Amman, Raghadan contains the throne room and is often used for formal state occasions.
That afternoon the atmosphere was anything but formal as around two thousand festive guests spilled out of the palace and into the tree-lined grounds. As well as friends and family from Jordan, we had invited friends from overseas, including Gig Faux, Perry Vella, and several others from Deerfield. Some of my Deerfield teachers came too, including Jim Smith, and one of my old bodyguards. There were friends from Sandhurst, other friends from England, and Rania's friends and family came from Kuwait and from Cairo. The Crown Prince of Morocco was there, as was General Joseph h.o.a.r, the head of U.S. Central Command. Queen Sofia of Spain also came, as my father was very close to the Spanish royal family. (This connection had developed in a roundabout way. One of my father's cla.s.smates at Victoria College in Egypt was the exiled King Simeon II of Bulgaria, who introduced him to other European royal families, including the Spanish. In a quirk of fate, King Simeon returned to Bulgaria after the collapse of the communist government, formed a new political party, won a majority in the 2001 Bulgarian elections, and was sworn in as prime minister.) The highlight of the reception was the surprise arrival of my old jumpmaster, Samih Janakat. As befits a Special Forces officer, he arrived by parachute, jumping into the palace grounds after dusk. Managing to avoid the nearby trees, buildings, and fountain, he landed perfectly in front of the a.s.sembled guests and presented Rania and me with a sword that we used to cut the wedding cake.
After the formal reception in the palace grounds, family and close friends retired for dinner at my mother's house in the hills above Amman, where we ate, talked, and danced next to a swimming pool. Finally, at around two in the morning, Rania and I said good night. The next morning we set out for America on our honeymoon, eager to begin our new life together.
As a wedding gift, my father paid for a first-cla.s.s flight via London to San Francisco, but once we were there we bought a Visit USA Air Pa.s.s, which allowed us a month of unlimited economy-cla.s.s travel. Rania had visited the United States a few times before, but I was eager to show her more. We flew first to Hawaii, detoured to Tahiti and Bora Bora, and then traveled to the East Coast, visiting New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Occasionally, when they heard we were honeymooners, the check-in staff would upgrade us to business cla.s.s.