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State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity
Marc Lynch
1999
5. Jordan in the Gulf Crisis: The Construction of Public Opinion
During the Gulf crisis, Jordan faced a set of excruciating choices, all of which potentially threatened the security and even survival of the state and the regime. With the exception of Iraq and Kuwait, no state in the region was more directly threatened in the crisis; and no state was more deeply affected by the course of events. Jordan’s decisions placed it outside the mainstream of the Arab order and outside the Western coalition. Despite its close relations with Iraq, Iraqi behavior placed Jordan in grave danger. Despite Jordan’s long covert relations and tacit cooperation with Israel, the crisis almost led to an Israeli-Jordanian confrontation. Why did Jordan decide to remain outside the American coalition, in the face of all these threats and dangers? What role did deliberation, whether at the Arab, international, or domestic levels, play in formulating Jordan’s sense of its interests in the crisis?
The Gulf war case is important both for Jordan and for broader trends in the Arab system. Like the Suez crisis and the 1967 war, the Gulf War profoundly changed the Arab order: ending Arab summitry; placing Iraq outside the bounds of Arab alliances and under a seemingly permanent sanctions regime; beginning the Madrid peace process and the articulation of a “Middle Eastern” regional identity; and initiating new regional alliances.
My object here is not to provide a detailed history of the Gulf crisis, but rather to compare competing explanations for Jordan’s behavior and to examine the implications for Jordanian identity and interests (see Hiro 1992; Haykal 1992; Freedman and Karsh 1993; Khadduri and Ghareeb 1997). Jordan’s refusal to join the coalition against Iraq in 1990–91 set it against Egypt and Syria, its traditional allies in the Gulf, the United States and Israel. From a rationalist perspective, Jordanian behavior would have to be considered surprising, despite post facto explanations. Power balancing, threat balancing, and political economy explanations all underdetermine outcomes. A constructivist public sphere approach can better explain Jordanian decisions. The framing of the crisis, public sphere structure, and the linking of Jordanian Arabist identity and interests to Iraq drove behavior under conditions of profound uncertainty. Jordan’s isolation from the Arabist public sphere during and after the Gulf crisis, combined with an Arabist public consensus produced within a specifically Jordanian public sphere, created a distinctive conception of identity and interests. Over the 1980s, Jordan developed a powerful positive identification with Iraq, based upon trade networks, political cooperation, and a carefully cultivated public friendship. The Gulf crisis placed central norms of Jordanian policy into conflict: opposition to the acquisition of land by force, to inter-Arab warfare, and to forceful Arab unity; support for Arab solutions, for Arabist dialogue, and for outcomes within the Arab consensus over those outside them. Jordan’s behavior in the Gulf crisis involved a concerted attempt to maintain an autonomous Arabist order while consolidating the domestic public consensus about Jordanian identity, interests, and regime legitimacy. The failure of the Arab order to produce a legitimate consensus, combined with the unprecedented openness of the Jordanian public sphere, shifted the terrain of the interpretive struggle.
Background
Relations between Jordan and Iraq in the decade prior to the Gulf Crisis had developed to the point of a close alignment, after a long period of suspicion and hostility beginning with the Iraqi revolution of 1958 overthrowing King Hussein’s Hashemite kinsmen (Baram 1991). In the late 1970s, Jordan turned toward Iraq as the state most likely to provide both strategic depth and economic benefits (Brand 1994, 1994b). The war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988) facilitated the consolidation of Jordanian-Iraqi relations. The active construction of positive identification can be seen in that the reaction to the embrace of Iraq in 1980 was far from positive. As one political activist remembers, “most Jordanian politicians were against the war, many going to the point of hoping the Iraqis would fail militarily.... the popular sentiments were similarly against Iraq... all despite the official position of the King” (Sha’ir 1987: 270–272). The negative public response, only a decade before the Gulf crisis, belies any assertion of organic, essential, or eternal pro-Iraqi public opinion. The closed and underdeveloped Jordanian public sphere had little impact on state policy, however. Opinion changed in Iraqi favor in the early 1980s, with official media encouragement, growing economic interaction, and popular anger inflamed by Syria’s threatening behavior. By the late 1980s, official relations had grown unusually close. The formation of the Arab Cooperation Council in 1989 represented a major—albeit short-lived—institutional formalization of the relationship (Ryan 1998). The development of Jordanian-Iraqi relations involved growing positive identification and a sense among Jordanians of a common destiny and shared interests which went beyond a temporary convergence of interests. Positive identification with Iraq developed over the course of a decade of close interaction and active construction of such identification.
Despite these close relations with Iraq, Jordan’s refusal to join the American coalition surprised most observers. Jordan was viewed as among the closest and most reliable American allies in the region, likely to be persuaded by an Arab consensus, likely to respond to economic incentives, and likely to perceive a serious threat from an aggressive Iraq. Jordanian behavior in this period is often misunderstood, both by its supporters and its critics. Popular perceptions of a Jordan enthusiastically supporting Iraqi aggression against Kuwait are as misleading as are revisionist arguments that Jordanian policymakers reluctantly sided with Iraq only because of irresistible popular or economic pressure. From the outset of the crisis, King Hussein condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Shuttling among world and Arab capitals, Hussein sought to find an acceptable solution within an Arab framework that would avoid war. After the failure of diplomatic efforts and the growing deployment of coalition troops, Jordan campaigned desperately for a peaceful solution within the Arab framework. The American deployment shifted the nature of the crisis from a controversial aggression by one Arab state against another to a face-off between an Arab power and the United States. From this shift emerged a position seen across the Arab world: against the Iraqi invasion, but even more against the Western intervention (Sayigh 1991; Joffe 1993; Ebert 1992; Khadduri and Ghareeb 1997).
This interpretation, despite its resonance at the popular level, failed to command a consensus at the official Arab level. On August 11, 1990, the Cairo Arab Summit issued a Resolution authorizing United Nations intervention, in effect absolving the Arab order of responsibility. Jordan strongly opposed this decision, for reasons discussed below. The buck-passing by the Arab League, the refusal to initiate inter-Arab dialogue toward a consensus solution, had as deep an impact on the Arab order as did Iraq’s violation of the norm prohibiting direct military action between Arab states. The remarkable admission of the failure of the regional framework effectively shattered the normative centrality of the Arabist order. That deliberation had failed would have been damaging but understandable; that deliberation was rejected violated the basic principles of the Arab public sphere. Deep rifts erupted between Arab states which have not healed, preventing the resumption of Arab summitry and profoundly undermining the institutional and normative foundations of the Arab order. The Cairo Summit, therefore, revealed the loss of the “will to consensus.”
After the failure of initial diplomatic efforts, the American-led coalition escalated its deployment in Saudi Arabia. The Americans and their Arab allies fashioned a sharply bipolar construction of the crisis in which neutrality equaled hostility. Jordan’s nuanced interpretation of its position fell on deaf ears. 1 Jordan adhered to the letter of UN resolutions, even as it came under punitive inspection regimes and accusations of sanctions-busting, and consistently maintained its neutrality as it argued for a diplomatic solution and rejected demands for active participation in the coalition efforts. Jordanian appeals for an Arab solution were interpreted as nothing but appeasement and Iraqi propaganda. Combined with the influx of hundreds of thousands of returnees from Kuwait, sanctions helped make Jordan the country that suffered the most after Kuwait and Iraq from the crisis. Jordanian society was extraordinarily mobilized during the crisis, with enormous pro-Iraqi rallies throughout the Kingdom. Jordanian officials point out that the “radicalism” of the Jordanian public often obscured the pragmatism and caution of Jordan’s actual behavior (Sharaf 1991).
Rationalist Explanations
Jordan’s behavior during the crisis reflected the extreme pressure, conflicting demands, and profound uncertainty it faced. Under such conditions of crisis and uncertainty, with major norms violated with impunity, public deliberation played an unusually important role in shaping state behavior. It is precisely when norms and expectations break down that public sphere theory expects deliberation to produce new collective understandings. I argue that each major rationalist explanation for Jordan’s Gulf crisis behavior underdetermines outcomes. While all of these explanations point to important dimensions of Jordanian considerations, they slight the centrality of public sphere deliberation for articulating Jordan’s interests and identifying appropriate strategies.
Threat Balancing
As has been noted by those attempting to apply rationalist models of alliance behavior, the wide range of threats facing Jordan during the Gulf crisis renders threat-based explanations problematic (Brand 1994; Harknett and VanDenBerg 1997). Threat-balancing explanations, even “omnibalancing” approaches which consider domestic threats to regime survival, assume the existence of a primary overriding threat. In 1990, Israel, Iraq, and domestic turbulence each posed some serious threat to Jordanian external security or regime survival. Which threat motivated Jordanian behavior?
My argument is not that threat was irrelevant for Jordanian behavior, but that public framing, interpretation, and identity drove the perception of threat. Threat clearly mattered for Jordan, given the intensity, scope, and militarization of the Gulf crisis. I argue that the construction of threat was the product of public interaction rather than an independent rational calculation. Because of uncertainty and the perception of threats emanating from every direction, interpretation necessarily played a major role. The most dangerous threat could quite plausibly have been constructed differently, and the appropriate response articulated differently. Analysis should be directed at the process of construction of national interests and threats which produces the articulation of relative threat, rather than at the independent causal power of threat perception (Campbell 1992).
Among the threats that could have plausibly driven Jordanian alignments in the crisis are Israel, Iraq, domestic upheaval, and a generalized fear of war. First, Jordan faced a potential threat of Israeli intervention. Even prior to the crisis, Jordanian leaders expressed fears of an Israeli mass expulsion of West Bank Palestinians into Jordan in order to create a Palestinian state on the East Bank (Telhami 1992a). Since the departure of Labor from the Israeli coalition, King Hussein enjoyed far less personal relations with Israeli decisionmakers. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, many Jordanians feared that Israel would use the pretext of Iraqi hostility to occupy Jordan on route to an invasion of Iraq. Public discussions of the diminishing value of Jordan for Israeli interests fed these fears (Sharara 1990; Lukacs 1997). In an October 1990 Knesset session, Shamir warned that “any destabilization [in Jordan] or intervention in its territory.. could increase the tensions to dimensions we will be unable to accept.” 2 Even the deployment of the Jordanian army in defensive positions along the Jordan River sparked bellicose Israeli comments and public threats. Jordan’s tilt to Iraq was interpreted by influential Israelis as evidence that Hussein had “lost control of his country,” that Jordan had become “an Iraqi satellite” and “thoroughly Palestinianized.” 3 While these sentiments were most expressed on the right, even Shimon Peres remarked that “as for its political life, Jordan has reached a dead end.” 4 Liberalization, when it gave voice to anti-Israeli opinion, compromised Hussein’s value as a guarantor of Israeli interests, the primary source of his legitimacy in their eyes. His “loss of control,” however much it accorded with Jordanian public opinion or interests, demonstrated Hussein’s failure as a leader. These arguments were prominent in the Israeli public sphere, and contained a barely veiled threat of military intervention.
While Israel certainly represented a threat, there are strong reasons to believe that such threats did not drive Jordanian behavior. Israel very clearly specified the conditions for intervention, allowing Jordan room for maneuver without bringing on retaliation. Furthermore, Israeli realization that a Palestinian state in Jordan would very likely have been even more pro-Iraq drove many previously ambivalent Israeli figures to publicly affirm Israel’s strategic interest in retaining the Hashemite regime (Klieman 1998). Finally, since the United States promised to achieve Israel’s strategic interest in destroying Iraqi military power, and desperately wanted Israel to stay out of the war in order to keep the Arab members in the coalition, there was little rational reason for Israeli military action. Indeed, American policymakers viewed Israel’s entry into the war as a worst-case scenario (Baker 1995). For obvious geographic reasons, any combat between Israel and Iraq would take place through Jordanian territory or airspace, while also resisting any Iraqi use of Jordanian territory. King Hussein warned Israel that Jordan would attempt to intercept any Israeli aircraft entering its airspace. While the Israeli military was confident of its ability to defeat Jordan militarily, the political consequences would have been shattering. Even when Iraq tried to provoke Israel by firing SCUD missiles—through Jordanian airspace—Israel did not respond. 5 Under these circumstances, the actual threat of an Israeli intervention would have to be seen as low. On the other hand, Israeli strategic policy had long been certain, massive retaliation for any attack, so even such strong disincentives could not be taken as a guarantee. And can leaders rely on the rationality of other leaders in such tense moments (Lebow 1981)?
Direct and indirect Jordanian-Israeli communications during the crisis were therefore of primary importance in moderating Jordanian threat perception (Baker 1995: 386; Susser 1994: 21; Arens 1995). Moshe Zak, one of the most informed sources on covert Jordanian-Israeli contacts, writes that King Hussein and Yitzhak Shamir met in London on January 4, 1991 to exchange views on the crisis and to find ways to avoid conflict. 6 Israeli officials made a series of public statements clearly signaling the red lines for Jordanian behavior: Israel would intervene if and only if Iraqi troops entered Jordan and “Israel’s eastern border became hostile.” In these statements, Israel specified which behavior would be seen as unacceptably threatening. Foreign Minister David Levy stated that “any threat coming from Jordan into Israel... or movement of troops from outside Jordan into Jordan will be a warning signal to Israel.” 7 Levy also claims to have privately reassured King Hussein through an intermediary and to have received a satisfactory response. 8 Defense Minister Moshe Arens credits his August 7 speech in the Knesset warning that “the moment we see.. the entry of the Iraqi army into Jordan, we shall act” with deterring both Jordan and Iraq from such an action (Arens 1995: 153). Hussein’s August 8 statement that “Jordan is not a passageway for anyone in either direction” satisfied the Israelis of his understanding of the signal, while also conveying a warning against Israeli attacks on Iraq over Jordanian airspace. 9 Prime Minister Mudar Badran also declared that Iraqi troops would not enter Jordan except in response to an Israeli incursion. 10 These communications, combined with the strategic factors discussed above, alleviated Jordanian concern with this threat. However, the difficulties of public signaling, as opposed to direct communications, can be seen in Arens’s recollection of his reaction to Jordan’s August 17 decision to raise the level of alert of the Jordanian Army: “I do not know if this was in expectation of an attack by us, in anticipation of the entry of Iraqi forces into Jordan, or maybe just King Hussein’s way of gaining support for himself from the mobs demonstrating in Amman” (Arens 1995: 154). Because of the strategic situation and the private communications, Jordanian state decisionmakers placed less weight on the Israeli threat than did the wider public, which demanded preparations for self-defense and regularly warned of immanent Israeli invasion. Jordanian officials stressed the Israeli threat in public more as a justification and demonstration of the regime’s valor, and as a signal to the Israelis, than as an indication of their true concerns.
Second, Jordan could be seen as bandwagoning with Iraq in order to protect itself against an Iraqi threat. Some analysts have suggested that Hussein’s real fear was that Iraq, surrounded on all sides, would decide to break out by invading Jordan en route to Israel in order to spark a general Arab-Israeli war and break up the coalition. By maintaining friendly relations with Iraq, Jordan could presumably forestall Iraqi aggression, by making itself too valuable to risk. In this case, aligning with Israel, openly or through participation in the U.S. coalition, in order to secure a credible balance against an Iraqi threat would be a more effective response. While Arabist norms in the past would have prohibited such an alliance choice, the participation of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in the coalition certainly provided sufficient cover in the Arabist public sphere. 11 Bandwagoning with Iraq to meet an Iraqi threat does not seem like a plausible explanation; Brand notes that “Jordanian decision makers did not understand their behavior as bandwagoning with Iraq” (1994: 294), and King Hussein regularly rejected any suggestion that this was Jordan’s policy. Israeli statements signaling their red lines to Jordan were also a clearly stated exercise in deterrence against Iraq. Since Iraqi movement into Jordan would have immediately brought on an Israeli retaliation, aligning with Iraq in order to forestall an Iraqi attack would have been somewhat superfluous. Finally, no evidence exists that Iraq conveyed a threat, explicit or implicit, to Jordan that it would attack if Jordan did not take its side.
Third, King Hussein could be seen less as bandwagoning with Iraq than as bandwagoning with domestic pro-Iraqi political actors in order to protect his regime from domestic upheaval. This has become the explanation of choice for analysts despairing of assigning causal weights to external threats to Jordan. In their analysis of Jordan’s behavior, for example, Harknett and VanDenBerg conclude that “joining the Arab-American coalition [sic] would have inflamed his [King Hussein’s] population and placed the monarchy in jeopardy of overthrow” (1997: 144). Brand similarly argues that “the clear and vociferous anti-American/pro-Iraqi message of a largely united Jordanian people during a period of transition from authoritarianism meant that a Gulf policy even remotely pro-coalition might well have led to severe instability, if not the end of the monarchy” (1993: 2–3). This threat to regime survival tends to be assumed rather than proved, however. While the atmosphere of late 1990 was certainly charged, no observers have produced convincing evidence that the army, the security services, or even major political groupings would have acted to overthrow the king had he sided with the U.S. coalition. Jordanian diplomatic history is a recitation of instances of Hussein’s decisions taken against the express desires of the majority of the Jordanian political public, none of which have cost the king his throne. The regime could certainly have explained the tremendous pressures Jordan faced, accused Iraq of violating Arab norms by invading Kuwait, and repressed the popular expression of anger. The regime’s ability to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and to turn against Iraq in 1995, without any serious threat of revolution suggests its relative stability in the face of popular anger. The causal argument for domestic threat rests on a counterfactual that seems implausible based on historical experience and contemporary evidence.
Fourth, perhaps Jordan felt that the outbreak of war under any conditions represented a fundamental threat to its interests and even to its survival. Should war break out, Jordan could become a battleground, its economy ruined, and its territory flooded with refugees. Hussein repeatedly, in every forum, warned that war would be a holocaust [karitha] for his country, the region, and the world. The search for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis, no matter what its conditions, was preferable to war. Therefore, Jordan balanced against a generalized threat of war by remaining neutral and trying to broker a diplomatic solution. This strains the threat-balancing concept, which assumes that states balance against each other, not against processes or generalized fears. However, Hussein and other Jordanian policymakers consistently explained their fears in this way: responding to the generalized threat of war in the region. In each of the crises between the United States and Iraq in the mid-1990s, Jordan expressed identical concerns about the catastrophic impact of any war in the area. The consistency of Jordanian mediation efforts and appeals for a peaceful solution, with no international support, reflects this perception.
Each of the threat-based explanations seems plausible. The very plausibility of such different causal paths, however, suggests that threat is not alone sufficient to explain Jordanian behavior. Some other process seems to be at work which made some behavior seem more threatening than others. The process of interpretation thus moves to the forefront in any threat-based explanation. I argue that the threat motivating policy emerges from the process of public sphere debate rather than following directly from any objective indicators. It was the interpretive process of framing the crisis, both inside of Jordan and within the Arabist and international public spheres, that produced the sense of the greater threat.
Political Economy
If threat balancing explanations fail to adequately explain Jordanian behavior, then what about material economic interests? Jordan’s economic dependence on Iraq has often been highlighted by rationalists frustrated by the shortcomings of power and threat theories. By focusing on the financial, oil, and trade relationships binding Jordan to Iraq, rationalists hold on to the primacy of objective, material interests. For example, Stanley Reed explained Hussein’s decisions in economic terms: “Behind his positions lies a Jordanian-Iraqi interdependence that has grown deep in recent years. Jordan has grown so dependent on Iraq as a market for its exports and as a source of cheap oil that destruction of the Iraqi economy threatens to destroy Jordan’s economy as well.” (Reed 1990/1991: 22; Ebert 1992) Statistics convincingly demonstrate this Jordanian dependence on Iraqi markets and oil. More problematic is the assumption of a direct, unmediated causal relationship between these material interests and political positions.
Like threat-based explanations, the economic argument underdetermines outcomes. For all Jordan’s trade dependence on Iraq, it also received huge and vital direct budget subsidies from many of the actors arrayed against Iraq. Brand’s (1994) budget security explanation of Jordanian foreign policy, emphasizing the importance of these direct subsidies for the maintenance of the neopatrimonial rentier state, argues that the state should give higher priority to such subsidies than to markets. Besides direct budget support, the remittances of Jordanians and Palestinians employed in the Gulf to Jordanian banks represented an essential pillar of Jordan’s political economy. The state also relied heavily upon international aid, from the U.S. and from international lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank. Support for Iraq clearly and unambiguously threatened all of these sources of budget support. Why were trade relations with Iraq valued more highly than the massive budget supports from the states ranged on the other side of the confrontation?
One explanation is that even prior to the crisis, Gulf states had been substantially cutting back on budget support to Jordan. By 1989, “it became apparent that none of Jordan’s traditional financial backers was prepared to be committed to an extended period of assistance... future aid would only be proffered on an ad hoc basis, often only after considerable Jordanian pleading” (Brynen 1992: 92). American and Gulf promises of aid in exchange for participation would have solved precisely this problem, however, making this explanation difficult to sustain.
The Jordanian decision also is not adequately explained in terms of poor information or incorrect beliefs about the economic consequences of alignment decisions. Decisionmakers and the public were painfully aware of the likely impact of the crisis on the Jordanian economy. The press published frank evaluations of the probable economic implications of the loss of Gulf support, of the blockade of the Port of Aqaba, of the mass return of Jordanians and Palestinians from jobs in the Gulf. There was very little in the public discourse to suggest any expectation that support for Iraq would prove financially rewarding in the short or medium term. The public exulted in the regime’s independence from budget imperatives in this crisis: “All Jordanians know that this position will cost Jordan dearly financially... but Jordan is governed by considerations deeper than money.” 12 Jordanians knew of the American inducements to its Arab coalition partners, such as forgiving billions of dollars in Egyptian military debt: “Jordan is fully aware of the size of the bribe it would have received had it agreed [to join the coalition]. We know that our foreign debts would have been canceled with a stroke of a pen, that the siege [of Aqaba] would have been lifted,... and that aid and money would have poured into Jordan from all directions.... The reason [Jordan refuses] can be summed up in one word: honor.” 13 King Hussein, in a press conference in mid-August 1990, explicitly declared that “money is the least of my concerns right now.” 14 When directly asked whether Jordanian economic ties to Iraq drove his policy, he responded, “this is not the truth.” 15 And when an American journalist asked King Hussein what one thing he would most like to say to President Bush, Hussein responded: “Our relations are not based on material considerations.... we have borne great hardships, but we are not cheap, believe me, we are proud.” 16 The express denial that financial considerations were driving policy should be taken seriously, given Hussein’s consistent expression of other justifications, as well as the demands of public consistency: if he had really been waiting for a better financial deal, then publicly disavowing the legitimacy of such incentives would have bound his hands in dangerous ways.
A more powerful explanation is that whatever the short-term losses, “Jordan’s long-run economic interests are in Iraq.” 17 Trade with Iraq involved the development of infrastructure, supply networks, regularized patterns of exchange, and product specialization which could not simply be redirected in the way that direct budget subsidies theoretically could be. While a French check for $200 million could completely and frictionlessly replace a Saudi check for that amount, the Iraqi market and the capital, transportation, and information investments underlying it could not be replaced with similar ease. No comparable markets existed in the area to replace the Iraqi market. Trade with the Iraqi market formed human networks of partnership and contacts. Amman Chamber of Commerce statistics indicate that some 250 Jordanian companies were established specifically for the Iraqi market, with 40 percent of manufactured exports going to Iraq immediately prior to the war. 18 As one Jordanian political scientist explains, “Iraq was the only Arab state that could solve Jordan’s long-term economic problems” (Naqrash 1994: 330–332).
The celebration of Jordan’s rejection of Western and Gulf financial incentives suggests that public framing produced a political reading of economic relations. The Jordanian public interpreted economic ties to Iraq as holding normative value deeper than their economic value. Ties to Iraq took on a heroic quality as an expression of Arab solidarity. Economic relations were interpreted, and became politically relevant, through the lens of identity. The constructivist argument that trade relations between Jordanians and Iraqis had built networks of community of identity and interests is thus more satisfying than a straightforward equation of economic interdependence and political interests, and better explains why Jordanian society placed higher value on Iraqi rather than Gulf economic relations.
Public Opinion and the Public Sphere
Rationalist explanations of Jordanian Gulf crisis behavior regularly import public opinion into ostensibly state-centric, materialist, and interest-based accounts (Anderson 1996). Brand, for example, modifies her rent-seeking theory in the Gulf war case by proposing that above all “King Hussein was responding to... popular opinion in the Jordanian street” (Brand 1994: 228). Virtually every account of Jordanian policy stresses the importance of public opinion, without allowing this recognition to infiltrate the broader theoretical reliance on variables such as power, economics, or threat. Many analysts admit that their theories underdetermine Jordanian behavior and then introduce a stylized reading of public opinion on an ad hoc basis to fill in the gap. The conventional version of this argument portrays a unified, mobilized Jordanian political society putting irresistible pressure on a beleaguered king who knew better but could not stand against the public trend. Support for Iraq welled up from the deep Arabist convictions of the people, who were emotionally swept away by the appearance of a “new Saladin” [or at least a new Nasser] bidding to unite the Arab world and confront the West. Because of the liberalization of 1989, the public had the means through which to declare and act upon its convictions. Since the democratization had become essential for regime legitimacy, the regime could not afford repression and could not oppose the will of the aroused public.
As the discussion in chapter 2 made clear, the public opinion introduced in these accounts should not be mistaken for the public sphere. The rationalist use of public opinion posits a sharp distinction between state interests and public opinion, where policy is potentially constrained by fear of “the street.” Public opinion represents a constraint upon the rational action of states. A public sphere account, in contrast, views public deliberation as constitutive of interests. In the Gulf crisis, the international public sphere demanded a binary choice which Jordan could not make, forcing Jordan out of the international consensus. The Arabist arena produced an official consensus through a process perceived as illegitimate, again forcing Jordan to stand outside the consensus. The Jordanian public sphere, opened by the 1989 liberalization, emerged as the primary location for debate about Jordanian identity and interests. This public deliberation produced an effective frame in support of Iraq which drove conceptions of Jordan’s Arabist identity and state interests. This consensus had a powerful effect on state behavior, not by compelling or constraining policy, but by framing the meaning and consequences of choices.
International Public Spheres
Despite Jordanian efforts to find an Arab solution, the international dimensions of the crisis almost immediately overwhelmed the Arab. In the eyes of Jordanians, the appeal for Arab dialogue and an Arab solution represented a vain effort to maintain the integrity and autonomy of the Arabist public sphere. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, it became almost inevitable that the United States would intervene and the crisis would become “internationalized” (Telhami 1992a). As the United States built its international coalition, it framed the crisis in a sharply dichotomous way: either with the coalition or against it. Within such a frame, Jordan’s attempts to remain neutral became nothing less than an alliance with Iraq and open hostility to the United States. King Hussein complained often about the failure of the West to understand Jordan’s position, objecting to the characterization of Jordan as supporting or defending Iraq. Jordanian officials referred to “an organized media campaign aimed at distorting Jordan’s position.” 19 Hussein’s attempts to address American public opinion failed to make any headway in convincing the United States of Jordan’s neutrality. Even King Hussein’s personal friendship with George Bush, and the general understanding in the Bush Administration of Jordan’s difficult strategic and political situation, could not overcome the power of this interpretive frame.
Bush regarded Hussein as “one of the worst offenders.. almost a spokesman for his neighbor Iraq” (Bush and Scowcroft 1998: 331). While the Bush Administration recognized that Jordan had not “backed Iraq,” in that it had refused to recognize the new Kuwaiti regime, rejected the acquisition of territory by force, and cooperated with sanctions, it nevertheless was infuriated by Jordan’s voicing of Iraqi “propaganda” (Bush and Scowcroft 1998: 347&-;48). Congress voted harsh penalties on Jordan as an “Iraqi ally.” 20 American and international media ridiculed King Hussein, usually portrayed as a dignified and moderate monarch, as an irresponsible Iraqi puppet.
Hussein’s greatest frustration in the international public sphere, besides the seemingly willful misrepresentation of Jordanian positions, came from the evident lack of American interest in finding a peaceful solution. Because of the strong Jordanian preference to avoid war, the American unwillingness to seriously engage in negotiations infuriated the King. Jordanian officials often expressed the belief that the United States, like the Arab order before it, had not given diplomacy a chance. Once the decision had been made for military action, the United States had no interest in allowing the initiative of real dialogue oriented toward finding a diplomatic compromise. The United States therefore drew a firm, uncompromisable line: full, unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. The exchange of argument and dialogue in the international public sphere, which might lead toward a compromise in which the interests of both sides were represented, would signify failure for American policy and a disaster for American interests as articulated by the Bush Administration.
The Americans objected to the Jordanian media, which provided one of the only outlets by which Iraqi positions and justifications, as well as undesirable information, might reach the international public sphere (Bush and Scowcroft 1998: 347–48). From the American perspective, the Jordanian media served Iraqi propaganda and, worse, willfully rejected the coalition’s imposed interpretative frame. The United States placed great importance on controlling information during the crisis, both to ward off uprisings in Arab members of the coalition and to prevent the Iraqi case from being expressed in any international public sphere (Telhami 1992a; Taylor 1992). At several points, Bush publicly vented his anger with the Jordanian media, alternately amusing and infuriating Jordanians, who wondered cynically how the leader of the democratic world found it in himself to criticize their free expression of opinion. As a Professional Associations committee declared, “they deny the Jordanian people their right to express their opinions freely and deny the leadership of the country the democratic approach, as if democracy were the monopoly of the West.” 21 Jordanians felt themselves to be the object of American psychological warfare, and tended to dismiss news in Western media as disinformation—a perspective which was used as evidence of their irrationality and susceptibility to conspiracy theories at that time, but which seems rather reasonable in light of later self-criticism by the American media.
The most important practical manifestation of Jordan’s behavior from the viewpoint of the international community was its compliance with the sanctions regime. Jordan agreed to comply with all sanctions authorized by the UN, though it questioned their motives, scope, and legitimacy. The UN, for its part, recognized the severe consequences of the sanctions for the Jordanian economy and provided special waivers and compensation for Jordanian compliance. The intrusive inspection regime at the Port of Aqaba often seemed, at least to Jordanians, to be aimed more at punishing Jordan than at isolating Iraq. Aid to Jordan was tied to compliance with the sanctions, much as it had in the past been tied to participation in the peace process.
Israel provided the context for the other major international public sphere concern. Above I discussed Israeli-Jordanian communications over the conditions for Israeli intervention in Jordan. Despite the basic strategic understanding between the two leaderships, Israeli public interpretations of the “radicalization” and “Palestinianization” of Jordan powerfully influenced international perceptions of Jordan during the crisis. One of the major justifications for Israeli support of a Hashemite regime in Jordan had long been that the Hashemites were superior to any alternative regime, whether PLO, Islamist, Transjordanian nationalist. If King Hussein could not control the expression of radical public opinion, and allowed this public opinion to guide Jordanian foreign policy, then some Israelis suggested that perhaps Hussein’s regime was no better than an alternative regime after all. Perhaps even more crucially, Jordan blasted the double standard in the enforcement of international law, the disjuncture between the emphasis on the need to enforce UN resolutions on Kuwait and the failure to enforce UN resolutions on Palestine, which raised the question of “linkage” the United States and Israel wanted to avoid.
Arabist Public Sphere
Throughout the crisis, Hussein pleaded for a peaceful Arab solution through dialogue, searching for a way to maintain the integrity of regional institutions against the demand for international intervention. Jordan consistently justified its behavior in terms of the norms of an autonomous Arabist order, the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force, and peaceful conflict resolution through dialogue (Naqrash 1994; Nahar 1993; White Book 1991). The consistency of Jordanian discourse, over time, over different issue areas, and across public spheres with widely varying interpretive demands, should be taken seriously as an indicator of the weight of the Jordanian interpretation on its behavior. The norms emphasized in Jordan’s framing of the crisis were consistent across domestic and foreign policy, deeply institutionalized in Jordanian discourse and practice, and actively invoked to explain Jordan’s behavior.
Brand objects to a norms-based account, which might claim that “the King’s sense of Arabism—by all accounts quite strong—motivated him to seek an inter-Arab solution,” because “then one would have to argue why such a sense of Arabism... led him to stand more firmly by Arab Iraq than by Arab Kuwait.” (Brand 1994: 287). An important theoretical point common to rationalist theories lies concealed within this formulation. Arabism here seems to be a conviction located within Hussein’s subjectivity: “the King’s sense of Arabism.” This construction slights the intersubjective dimension of norms. Arabism should be conceptualized as a set of publicly contestable norms to which Jordanian politicians and publics respond, and on which they rely to interpret reality and to construct meaningful action.
Brand’s objection nevertheless poses a core rationalist challenge to constructivism: why does one interpretation of Arabism defeat another? After all, Iraq clearly violated a central Arabist norm by occupying another Arab state. The answer to this important question lies in the process of strategic framing and the structure of the relevant public spheres. Jordan’s interpretive frame clearly integrated these norms. Jordan rejected the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, continued to recognize the Kuwaiti ruling family, and endorsed the principle of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force. On the other hand, Jordan objected to the internationalization of the crisis, the rejection of dialogue and diplomacy, and the rush to war. In the Jordanian view, Iraq had legitimate complaints against Kuwait with regard to oil and finance. Such complaints must not be resolved by force—hence, the condemnation of the invasion. Instead, they should be resolved through dialogue within Arab institutions aimed at establishing mutually acceptable norms of justice with regard to the distribution of Arab oil wealth. The normative centrality of dialogue emerged with unusual clarity throughout the crisis, as Jordan elevated the principle of hiwar to the defining feature of the Arabist order. By calling on American intervention, Kuwait and other Arab states implicitly abandoned the principle of an Arab order. King Hussein charged that “certain Arab actors chose from the beginning to reject any Arab political dialogue with Iraq,” and blamed them for the failure of the Arab solution. 22
The theme of the primacy of maintaining an Arab framework for resolving inter-Arab disputes took precedence over all other Jordanian arguments. The existence of the Arab order depended upon the autonomy of Arabist institutions and the primacy of the Arab will to consensus. Maintaining an Arab framework for conflict resolution represented a cornerstone of the institutional identity of the Arab order. This interpretation of Arabism, centering on cooperation within Arab institutions between sovereign Arab states, resonated with the sovereignty-based interpretation of Arabism championed by Hussein since the 1960s. Jordan’s representative to the Arab League forcefully argued this position: “Jordan sees this situation as an Arab affair in the first degree which must be settled within an Arab framework without being turned into an opportunity for foreign intervention.” 23
The principle of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force represented a second deeply embedded constitutive norm of Jordanian foreign policy. Since the emergence of the Arab order Jordan had advocated a form of Arabism that recognized state sovereignty and that rejected intervention in the affairs of other Arab states. This position follows from Jordanian interest in state survival amidst more powerful neighbors, as Jordan regularly appealed to norms of sovereignty and nonintervention in the face of Arabist challenges. This defense of sovereignty surpassed the simple expression of interest, becoming a focal point for Jordanian discourse in the Arabist public sphere. Like its defense of the autonomy of the Arab order, the Jordanian interpretation of the norm of sovereignty has been expressed consistently over a long period of time in its Arabist argumentation.
After Jordan lost the West Bank in 1967, the principle of the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force assumed particular importance in Jordanian discourse in the international public sphere. In its struggles with Israel over the eventual disposition of the West Bank, Jordan built its case on this principle and argued it so consistently that it surpassed an expression of interest. The principle became a central norm, not only for Jordanian diplomacy but also for the internal construction of Jordanian identity. Regardless of any sympathy with Iraqi claims against Kuwait, Jordanian policymakers insisted on applying this norm to that situation as well. Of course, norms and interest were not exclusive, actively reinforcing one another. Jordanians feared that any recognition of the Iraqi right to occupy Kuwait would fatally undermine the objection to Israeli occupation of Palestine. In a letter to Saddam Hussein in September 1990, King Hussein made this fear explicit: “You know that we are committed to the principle of not permitting the acquisition of land by force.. not only because of international principles but also because of our situation in confronting Zionist ambitions.. Violating the principle sets a dangerous precedent which will benefit Israel and will threaten the security and the existence of Jordan.” 24
Jordanian diplomatic initiatives based on these principles—the autonomy of the Arabist order, peaceful conflict resolution, and the inadmissibility of acquiring land by force—foundered upon the American determination to prevent a regional solution, Iraqi intransigence, and the submission of key Arab actors to American policy. The Cairo Summit on August 11, 1990 condemned the Iraqi occupation and authorized UN intervention. Despite its principled appeal to Arab consensus, Jordan in practice rejected the consensus produced at the Cairo Summit. This rejection is puzzling: why should a state desperately campaigning for an Arab solution and committed to achieving Arab consensus reject the summit decision? The simple answer that the summit produced the “wrong” result is unconvincing. Jordan has frequently accepted an Arab consensus against its strong and impassioned objections, most notably at the 1974 Rabat summit recognizing the PLO as the sole Palestinian representative. Jordan has consistently preferred outcomes within an Arab consensus to an objectively better outcome outside the Arab consensus.
One major reason for Jordan’s rejection of the Cairo resolutions relates to the procedures governing consensus formation: by violating the norms of Arab consensus formation, the Cairo Summit forfeited legitimacy as a statement of an authentic Arab consensus (Khalidi 1991; Haykal 1992). This argument draws on Habermas’s discourse ethics, in which the legitimacy of a consensus depends upon its having been achieved in accordance with certain procedural rules (Habermas 1996; Bohman 1996; Chambers 1996). For the Arabist public sphere, the minimal requirements might be characterized as the participants representing Arab positions independent of foreign influences and exerting a genuine effort to achieve consensus in defense of collective Arab interests and norms. The Jordanians, like many others, believed that these minimal conditions had not been met in Cairo (Mattar 1995; Khalidi 1991). Argumentation between Arab leaders was palpably irrelevant to the summit resolution. Jordanian and other dissenting participants were not persuaded of the value of the adopted position, which they perceived as compelled by power. According to Jordanian and Palestinian commentators, as well as the towering Egyptian journalist Mohammed Hassanein Haykal (1992), Egyptian President Mubarak tightly controlled the summit, to the outrage of dissenters: “After the [Egyptian-Saudi] resolution was introduced, Mubarak asked only for the votes in favor—there were twelve [a simple majority]—and then concluded the session refusing to allow amendments, discussion, votes against, or abstentions. Three heads of state later claimed that Mubarak had prevented them from speaking at the summit, and alternatives... were not presented for a vote” (Khalidi 1991). Egyptian government sympathizers contest this description of the Summit proceedings, providing a counter-narrative in which all participants spoke at great length; in which King Hussein and Yasir Arafat were among those eager to end debate; and in which the final resolution commanded wide support. The vehemence of the presentation of this frame, particularly the furious responses to the Jordanian White Book and to Haykal, demonstrates the importance placed on the legitimacy of these procedures. Were these allegations true, the consensus could not claim to be the product of open, rational debate.
Besides the absence of deliberation, the Cairo Resolutions came under attack as not authentically Arab. The Egyptian position, according to the Jordanians, changed under American pressure. Hussein claimed that in early August he had secured, with Egyptian backing, an Iraqi commitment to withdraw from Kuwait, only to have Mubarak dramatically reverse his position and wreck the deal. Egypt furiously denied the allegation, but the argument is important for understanding Jordanian framing of the crisis. The intrusion of external power doubly corrupted the process of consensus formation. First, by compelling the Egyptian position, the American exertion of power prevented the operation of rational debate. Second, since the Egyptian position came from the Americans, it did not represent an authentic Arab position. Rather than a consensus expressing true Arab preferences, the Resolution represented the forceful imposition of American preferences. Because of the intrusion of power and the role of external actors, the Cairo Summit forfeited legitimacy as a carrier of an Arab consensus. For Jordanians, this corrupted summit represented not the freely determined consensus of Arab states but “Arab cover for American decisions.” 25 The Arab coalition members were “mortgaged to the aggressive desires and will of the United States,” not representing authentic, free Arab will. 26 Wherever Arab states permitted some degree of free expression, public opinion generally supported Iraq and criticized the performance of the Arab regimes. The sharp divergence between the interpretation of the situation held by most Arab publics and the interpretation advanced to justify the summit resolution further undermined the validity and authenticity of the Arab consensus.
After the Cairo Summit, Jordan continued to campaign for a diplomatic solution. Hussein’s itinerary during the months of the crisis indicates the extent of his efforts to find such a solution. Jordanian spokesmen complained bitterly about the misrepresentation of Jordanian positions: “There have been persistent attempts to do violence to Jordan’s reputation and credibility, when we are making every effort to bring back stability to the region through dialogue.” 27 The Arab coalition members engaged in fierce political campaigns against Jordan, rejecting any dialogue and damning Jordan as an Iraqi apologist. Jordan threatened these states by contesting the interpretive frame installed at the Cairo summit and exposing its failure to meet Arab norms and to defend Arab interests. The coalition regimes, afraid of popular unrest as well as uneasy with the implications for Arab norms, feared the impact of Jordanian discourse on their public opinion and worked to misrepresent it and silence it, rather than responding to the arguments in a reasoned way. Events such as the massacre of Palestinian worshipers at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the Israeli deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank exacerbated the situation, forcing Arab publics and leaders to confront the de facto alliance with Israel which the Cairo frame obscured and the Jordanian discourse exposed.
Because of the divergence between the Jordanian frame and the “official” Arab position, Jordan found itself largely excluded from the Arabist public sphere. This exclusion meant that the Arabism of Jordanian behavior would primarily be determined in the Jordanian public sphere. Jordanian policy was framed in Arabist terms, despite its exclusion from the Arab consensus. For perhaps the first time in Jordanian history, the Hashemite isolation from the Arab consensus was viewed by the Jordanian—and Palestinian—publics as the result of the superior Arabism of the Jordanian position. This provided great normative value for the regime, while largely insulating it from Arab criticism: for once it was the Syrian and the Gulf positions which were seen by public opinion to be corrupt, inauthentic, and anti-Arabist.
The Jordanian Public Sphere
While Jordan’s interpretation of international norms can explain a great deal of its behavior, the analysis is critically incomplete without taking into account the domestic articulation of Jordanian identity and interests. The public sphere argument developed here should be distinguished from the common interpretation that Jordanian policy simply responded to the constraints imposed by mass public opinion. By this argument, unified public opinion in the newly liberalized Jordanian political system shaped state behavior. A characteristic statement comes from Dilip Hiro’s history of the war: “32 out of 80 elected deputies were Islamic fundamentalists, and three-fifths of the citizens were of Palestinian origin who regarded Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Saladin.... King Hussein had little choice but to tilt to the Iraqi regime” (Hiro: 123). Faced with intense public pressure and unable to crack down, King Hussein followed the mob (Brand 1991a).
This account, while persuasive in its broad outline, misrepresents the nature of Jordanian public opinion formation. It tends to assume a prior and constant degree of support for Iraq among all sectors of political society, which was then revealed by liberalization and the Gulf crisis rather than formed in the political process. It reads political behavior directly off of essentialized, ascribed identities: Jordanians supported Saddam because of their nature as “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Palestinians.” I would argue, by contrast, that the commitment of Jordanian society to Iraq emerged through the process of public deliberation. Noting that many Jordanians are Islamists, Palestinian in origin, or economically dependent on Iraq is not a sufficient explanation for their political behavior. Where Palestinians or Islamists rallied to Iraq, it was because of the successful articulation of an identity frame which asserted a shared Jordanian-Iraqi identity and interests. For the emergent Jordanian consensus, “the unjust war did not only target Iraq but also all who stand beside Iraq and its Arab nationalist message.” 28 This collective identity frame, in which Jordan’s Arab identity was articulated as directly linked to Iraq, was both the cause of Jordanian behavior and the outcome of public debate.
Highly contested questions continue about the origin of the 1990 Jordanian consensus. Some observers saw the press commentary as led directly by the regime: “when al-Ra’i writes that the war in Iraq is a holy war... this is not evidence of a free press in Jordan giving vent to its unfettered views.... it is an expression of the opinions prevailing today in the royal court.” 29 Others saw public opinion driving state behavior, arguing that King Hussein had “lost control” and was “at the mercy of radical trends.” Participants also disagreed about the precise relationship between opinion leaders and public opinion. Nabil Sharif, editor of a major daily, contends that “during the Gulf war, the press was primarily responsible for the mass mobilization on the side of Iraq.... there was already predisposition in that direction, but the press crystallized and focused popular sentiment.” 30 Rather than public opinion existing fully formed and waiting for an opportunity to express itself, opinion leaders played an important role in interpreting the crisis and influencing the direction of public mobilization. The only book-length treatment of the performance of the Jordanian press in the crisis documents the ways in which the press guided public behavior: enforcing unanimity of interpretation, publishing prominently the statements of political parties and activists, publicizing rallies and meetings, printing analysis and debate, contesting Western news reports, and spreading hope of victory (Barakat 1992).
Still, not all participants accept the proposition that the press created or even led public opinion. Some writers tend to be more struck by the power exerted by popular consensus on the press than on the role of the press in creating consensus. In the midst of the crisis, Fahd al-Rimawi located the real force of the consensus in the public: “Most of the time I feel that the writer follows public opinion and does not create it.... he represents the dictatorship of mass frenzy and does not oppose it.” 31 Muna Shaqir, a formidable political analyst, similarly observed that “writers said what the people wanted to hear... we reflected the convictions of the masses rather than producing new convictions... we swam with the tide rather than try to redirect it.” 32 This interpretation seems to remove all agency from the explanation, portraying an authoritative consensus that emerged on its own. While this analysis certainly captures the sense of helplessness felt by many Jordanians in the face of the relentless slide to war, it unnecessarily and incorrectly slights the importance of the public sphere in shaping the political consensus. The existence of a public sphere in which collective interpretations were shaped, rather than the specific agency of individual writers, explains the impact of public deliberation. The press established the interpretive frame by which the public understood the crisis.
The argument that public deliberation produced the consensus begins from the important but overlooked fact that the initial reaction was far from unanimous. In the first few days after the Iraqi invasion, a wide array of reactions appeared in the press and throughout public discourse. Many Jordanians initially condemned the invasion as an impermissible Arab-Arab bloodletting. Analysts weighed, with varying results, the norms of sovereignty and peaceful resolution of conflicts against the merit of Iraqi claims against Kuwait and Kuwaiti intransigence. Most were impressed by Iraqi arguments but profoundly uneasy about the precedent of the military annexation of one Arab country by another. The initial reaction, hesitant and frightened for regional security, belies the post-facto reconstruction of Jordanian opinion as fervently pro-Iraqi from the beginning. An alternative frame was readily available which would have convincingly justified Jordanian participation in an anti-Iraq coalition. A number of influential writers argued the Iraqi case immediately, but this should not conceal the real pluralism of opinion: their arguments were hotly contested, rather than accepted blindly, and both frames could have reasonably emerged as dominant.
This intense public sphere contestation did not last long. Consensus followed closely upon the shifting of the terms of debate from “Iraq vs. Kuwait” to “Iraq vs. United States” in the first weeks of the crisis. The rise of this frame is essential to understanding the process of consensus formation in the Jordanian public sphere. Once the conflict left the inter-Arab framework, many of the ambiguities of the interpretive process disappeared: “We don’t incline toward Iraq or toward Kuwait.... the choice is between Arabs and the forces of foreign imperialism... and so we incline to ourselves and to all Arabs.” 33 Rather than weighing the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty against the manifest injustice of the distribution of Arab wealth, observers now saw an intervention by the imperial powers against an Arab challenger. The frame made sense of all that had taken place and offered a clear normative prescription. Obviously, the coalition’s primary concern was to restore control of Arab oil to the compliant hands of the Kuwaitis. Obviously, the U.S. sought to serve Israel by destroying its rising Iraqi challenger. Obviously, the coalition represented naked self-interest, power against principle. Obviously, the Arab states had abandoned their norms and identity in return for selfish interests. In such an interpretive frame, Arab identity and Arab interests seemed to demand resistance to foreign power, meaning support for Iraq. In the absence of this frame, it is not at all clear that the Jordanian public would have settled upon consensus support of Iraq: “if the differences had remained between Iraq and Kuwait only, there could have been division on the method of tackling the issue.” 34 The equation of Arab identity and the Iraqi position emerged from the frame, then, rather than from pre-existing or objective factors.
Once this frame crystallized, it translated quickly into an articulation of Jordanian interests and prescriptions for behavior. The Jordanian public asserted a conception of Jordanian interests based on identification with Iraq and with Arabism. Barakat points out that “quickly there came to be only one opinion... to the extent that some writers totally changed their positions with astonishing speed” (1992: 17). Once this popular consensus formed “there was almost a complete consensus among the writers, and in fact it was virtually impossible for anyone to write anything on the other side of the issue.. popular pressure prevented anyone from taking other positions than support for Iraq against Kuwait and the US.” 35
A controversial explanation of the Jordanian consensus has been Iraqi penetration of the Jordanian public sphere. In October 1995, the Arab daily al-Hayat alleged wide scale Iraqi penetration of Jordanian political and media circles. According to this report, based on leaks from official sources then looking to break Jordanian-Iraqi relations, Iraq had for decades paid a large number of prominent writers substantial amounts to push the Iraqi line in the Jordanian public sphere. While the government declined to prosecute the alleged Iraqi agents, citing the difficulty of proving such clandestine ties, few Jordanians find it implausible. 36 The pro-Iraq position of many opinion leaders, as well as their furious reaction, could well be explained by such payoffs. Such subsidies to writers are a well-established practice in the Arab press and a well-known Iraqi policy. 37 Egyptian President Mubarak explained the position of the Jordanian press as directly attributable to Iraqi bribes: “You go to Amman and you’ll see all the new Mercedes” (Baker 1995: 291). The close Jordanian-Iraqi alliance of the 1980s meant that many of those allegedly on the Iraqi payroll were regime loyalists, not opposition figures who could be easily dismissed. Prior to the crisis, however, there were wide sectors of the political public who did not express any particular sympathy with Iraq. The Arabist frame brought together Arabists, Islamists, Palestinians, and Jordanian nationalists, all of whom felt that support for Iraq best served both their identity and their interests. The support of Iraq emerged during the crisis rather than preceding it, and developed out of the interpretive frame of identity and interests, not out of an Iraqi checkbook.
Whatever the extent of Iraqi influence in producing a consensus among writers, it is insufficient to explain the political efficacy of the consensus. The consensus emerged from the dynamics of the public sphere debates, in which the public responded to and shaped the press response. The process of consensus formation in the early days of the crisis involved a real exchange of interpretations and arguments. Consensus quickly coalesced behind general agreement at the level of opinion leaders and the enthusiastic mobilization of the mass public. Enormous public rallies in support of Iraq, collections of funds to support the Iraqi people, volunteering to defend Iraq, and the issuing of declarations for the international media were some of the forms of action taken. In September, King Hussein even allowed a controversial conference of Arab popular opposition forces, which included some of Hussein’s bitterest political enemies, including George Habash and Nayif Hawatmeh. Once formed, the consensus proved extremely effective at uniting opinion, guiding behavior, and framing the interpretation of subsequent events.
The consensus in many ways became a barrier to rational public debate. Rimawi argued that “the mechanisms of repression are still present but have changed positions... before it came from official quarters, but now it comes from popular quarters.” 38 Fanik pointed out the interaction between the press and the public in the enforcement of consensus: “Had there been a Jordanian writer who wanted to argue against the popular consensus, he probably could not have found a paper to publish him, because no editor was ready to face the popular abuse.” 39 Other observers noted the divergence between public consensus and privately held opinion: “One did not read or even notice the existence of the other opinion despite the existence of a large number of writers who held other opinions and who presented them in studies, statements and analyses without their being published” (Suess and Tal 1991). Yaqoub Ziyadin, a veteran Communist Party leader, experienced harsh denunciations and personal attacks after publicly rejecting the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait and warning that no good could come of such behavior (Suess and Tal 1991). The force of this consensus reflects the concerns of some liberal theorists about the implications of Habermas’s ideal of consensus (Benhabib 1996; Rescher 1993).
This account of a suffocating consensus growing out of a constitutive moment of rational debate perhaps leaves an incorrect impression that most Jordanians were compelled into their pro-Iraq position by a combination of the media and the popular pressure of ideological groups (MacLeod 1991). This does not capture the reality of public sphere dynamics in Jordan during the crisis. Certainly, there was some degree of conformism enforced by public pressures. After the war, fashionable self-criticism admitted that “some of us take one position in our columns in daily newspapers and another position in private meetings.” 40 Publicly expressed convictions deepened palpably as time went by, as the course of international events reinforced the dichotomous structure of positions and the public response rewarded writers who argued the Iraqi case with praise, esteem, and popularity. This pressure to conformity with the consensus should not obscure the initial process of opinion formation, however, and the reality of competing frames within a relatively open public sphere.
An important point in support of the argument that the regime shared the public sphere articulation of state interests, rather than being compelled by its fear of public rebellion, is that the state did not respond to all popular demands. First, many of the more radical political parties and figures called on the government to arm and train the population to allow all Jordanians to participate in the national defense should Israel invade. Layth Shubaylat threatened a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Prime Minister Badran if he did not immediately begin a meaningful civil defense program. 41 The regime did not see that arming the population would contribute to its long-term security, and declined to take more than symbolic steps.
Second, the public demanded that Jordan defy the economic blockade of Iraq. The government could not afford to alienate the country from international society, however, and acceded to the sanctions decreed by the UN. In each case, the government easily deflected public demands which it deemed detrimental to Jordanian interests. The ability of the government to resist the more radical demands lends weight to the argument that the government acted as it did not out of fear of public uprisings but because it shared the conception of Jordanian interests articulated in the public sphere.
As should be clear, I am not arguing that the public commitment to Arabism led Jordan to act against its state interests. On the contrary, my argument is that the interpretations of Arabism in the Jordanian public sphere led Jordanians to articulate their state interests as best served by not joining the anti-Iraq coalition. Writers and officials alike argued that this policy served Jordanian interests, which coincided with generalized Arab interests. The Arabist frame, combined with Jordan’s exclusion from the official Arab consensus, largely determined the formulation of interests and behavior. The understanding of state interests which guided state behavior developed through positive engagement with the Jordanian public sphere and the harsh rejection in the Arabist and international public spheres. Jordan’s international and Arab isolation after the crisis, combined with the great domestic support for these positions, form the context for the three chapters to follow: the peace treaty with Israel, the struggles over normalization with Israel and new conceptions of regional order, and the turn against Iraq in 1995.
Endnotes
Note 1: George Bush demonstrated his understanding of the difficulties of the Jordanian position; see “White House moderates its criticism of Jordan,” Washington Post September 5, 1990, and Bush and Scowcroft (1998). That he nevertheless punished Jordan reveals the rigidity of the American frame. Back.
Note 2: Knesset session broadcast live on Israeli Radio, October 15, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–200). Back.
Note 3: Phrases taken from Jerusalem Post editorials between November 1990 and July 1991. Representative essays include “King Hussein vs. Islamic Fundamentalism” November 16, 1990; “The Jordan connection!!” December 1, 1990; “Jordan’s choice” January 1, 1991; “Is the Hashemite imbroglio getting out of control?” January 4, 1991; “Reassessing King Husayn,” January 24, 1991; “Mislabeling Jordan,” February 6, 1991; Moshe Zak, “Is Jordan cooperating with Iraq?” January 25, 1991; Mordechai Nisan, “Israel’s political dogma on Jordan.” February 20, 1991. Back.
Note 4: Shimon Peres interviewed on Cairo Radio, October 15, 1990 (FBIS-NES-205). Back.
Note 5: This non-response was immensely controversial and not inevitable, however; see Arens (1995) and Shamir (1994) for the internal Israeli debate over retaliation. Back.
Note 6: In The Jerusalem Post, January 24, 1997, p. 17. Back.
Note 7: David Levy on Israeli TV, August 20, 1990, in IFR vol.12, document 153. Back.
Note 8: David Levy on Israeli TV, October 18, 1990, FBIS-NES-90–204. Back.
Note 9: King Hussein press conference, August 8, 1990, in Hashemite Outcries [hereafter HO], p. 56; Arens (1995) on Israeli satisfaction with the response. Back.
Note 10: Mudar Badran in Jordan Times, January 12, 1991, FBIS-NES-91–009. Back.
Note 11: The importance of Arabist norms in eliminating Israel as a viable choice of alliance partners is itself an important point whose significance is not generally appreciated. Nothing in power or threat alone explains the consistent refusal to align with Israel by all Arab states. Back.
Note 12: Jamil al-Nimri, “Hussein and the diplomacy of the Arabist position.” al-Ahali September 5, 1990. Back.
Note 13: “The Arab Washington does not know.” al-Dustur February 1, 1991 (FBIS-NES-91–023) Back.
Note 14: Press conference at Kennebunkport, August 16, 1990, in HO, p. 78. Back.
Note 15: Interview, September 21, 1990, in HO, p. 98. Back.
Note 16: Interview, ABC TV, February 9, 1991, in HO, p. 232. Back.
Note 17: Fahd al-Fanik, quoted in al-Ahali September 5, 1990. Back.
Note 18: Amman Chamber of Commerce Report, discussed in al-Dustur September 4, 1995. Back.
Note 19: White Book, p. 19. Back.
Note 20: Harknett and VanDenBerg (1997) argue that Bush showed considerable sympathy for Hussein, misleading Congress about the extent of Jordanian alignment with Iraq. Back.
Note 21: Statement published in al-Dustur September 26, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–191). Back.
Note 22: King Hussein speech to the nation, February 6, 1991, in HO , p. 224. Back.
Note 23: White Book, Document #1. Back.
Note 24: Ibid., Document #7. Back.
Note 25: Shihan cited in Barakat, p. 39. This description is repeated uncontested, in popular and official discourse, and can be taken as a consensus interpretation in the Jordanian public sphere. Back.
Note 26: Hamada Fara’na, “What does the Kuwaiti delegation want?” al-Dustur December 3, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–232). Back.
Note 27: Marwan al-Qassim, Radio Monte Carlo, October 29, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–210). Back.
Note 28: Hamada Fara’na, “Jordanians and Palestinians in one trench,” al-Dustur March 12, 1991. Back.
Note 29: Moshe Zak, “Is Jordan cooperating with Iraq?” Jerusalem Post January 25, 1991. Back.
Note 30: Nabil Sharif, personal interview, Amman, March 16, 1995. Back.
Note 31: Fahd al-Rimawi, “The non-appearance of the other opinion,” Shihan January 26, 1991. Back.
Note 32: Muna Shaqir, “The role and responsibility of the writer,” al-Dustur March 31, 1991. Back.
Note 33: Fahd al-Fanik quoted in Barakat, p. 25. Back.
Note 34: Mahmoud al-Sharif, quoted in al-Urdun, December 3, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–232). Back.
Note 35: Nabil al-Sharif, personal interview, March 16, 1995. Back.
Note 36: Prime Minister Zayd bin Shakir maintained his belief in such payments despite the lack of evidence because “some articles clearly show the writer is working against the interests of this country.... I read articles which I do not believe any loyal Jordanian could write.” Interview reported in al-Hayat November 16, 1995. Needless to say, opposition writers resented the implication that their opposition could only be explained by treachery. Back.
Note 37: Brand (1994), p. 206 and p. 212 offers a number of examples, such as Iraq’s funding of a $2.7 million housing project for journalists and a 1981 gift of $100 million to the Jordanian Ministry of Information. Back.
Note 38: Rimawi, “The other opinion”; Shaqir, “The role and responsibility of the writer.” Back.
Note 39: Fanik, “The other opinion.” Back.
Note 40: Shaqir, “The role and responsibility of the writer.” Back.
Note 41: Jordan Times October 7, 1990 (FBIS-NES-90–195). Back.
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