BEIRUT — The terror attack against three hotels in Amman, Jordan, November 9, represents a qualitatively significant and troubling step in the global dynamics of terror and the “global war on terror”. While terror attacks against local and foreign targets in Jordan are not new, this one has special significance, if, as claimed, it is the work of Osama Bin Laden’s main man in Iraq and the Middle East, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
As such, it represents another fateful step in the expansion of terror tactics throughout the Middle East. This in turn highlights a negative consequence of the Anglo-American-led war in Iraq, and the impossible predicament this generates for most people in the Arab world. Jordan today reflects the dilemma of those hundreds of millions of Arabs who oppose American policies in this region and also suffer from their consequences of widening instability and terror.
Jordan has long been vulnerable to terror attacks because of four broad strands of its policies — a tradition of close relations with and dependence on Western powers (the U.K., then the U.S.); a penchant to run against the grain of Nasserite-and Baathist-style emotional Arab nationalism; a close but awkwardly competitive relationship, and occasional confrontation, with Palestinian nationalism; and, a penchant secretly to explore means of coexistence with Israel and Zionism as a means to ensuring Jordan’s own survival and prosperity, culminating in the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty.
For these and other reasons, Jordan has suffered ideological opposition and a sustained series of terror attacks in the country and abroad for decades. Thus from its early days of proto-statehood in the 1920s Jordan has had to create a very efficient security system, with a combination of coverage by the armed forces, the police and the general intelligence department that has been the envy of other security agencies in the developing world.
Jordanians largely have supported and appreciated the work of their security services, for the stability and daily life normalcy they provide. The cost, in terms of stunted domestic political freedoms and participation, and stifled cultural expression, has been one that most Jordanians grudgingly accept to pay, particularly in contrast with the war, violence and chaos that has intermittently plague nearby countries. Jordan’s pragmatic state-building formula has been a relatively successful one that has also absorbed millions of Palestinian refugees and emigrants from other Arab lands into the national demographic fabric, despite occasional stresses.
In the past four years Jordan’s sustained record of stability in the face of regional tensions and ideological foes has had to absorb the new challenge of the consequence of siding with the United States on the “global war on terrorism”. Jordan has always fought terror vigorously and effectively, given its status as a favorite target of terrorists; but it had usually done so within a regional context, a sort of ugly game amongst local protagonists who knew each other well and kept it all in the neighborhood. Jordan, Syria, Iraq, the PLO, Libya and other players would fight each other one year, then form unions the next. This roller coaster of unpredictability and rolling contradictions has been a constant feature of the modern Arab world that confounds outsiders, but nevertheless defines local behavior.
Since September 2001, the local neighborhood and its peculiar political and terror games have gone global. The United States has entered the picture with an army that still dominates events in Iraq. The rules of the game have changed. The dominant dynamic that now defines events pits the United States’ neo-conservative-driven ideology and armed forces, and their global and Middle Eastern government partners, on the one hand, against a range of anti-American populist and terrorist forces, on the other. The anti-American forces include two very different groups: first, the mass public opinion sentiments in the Middle East that reject American policies and military interventions, but aspire to changes through peaceful political action and resistance; second, the small band of terrorists who are inspired and led by Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group and offshoots like Zarqawi in Iraq.
The November 9 attacks in Amman may represent the most dramatic example of the confused consequences of the Anglo-American-led war in Iraq. Under its present indirect American military management, Iraq has become the main training ground and motivating force for Bin Ladenist terrorists in the Middle East. Some of these deadly militants are starting to implement the policies that they have always espoused, mainly targeting the U.S. and its global allies in the war on terror, along with Arab governments whom they view as equally culpable of crimes against the Islamic realm.
The new dilemma for countries like Jordan is acute: the Jordanian population that strongly opposes American foreign policy now also suffers the crimes of terrorist forces that have been motivated anew by the consequence of American policies in Iraq and other lands. Iraq today has become the spawning ground for the current wave of terrorism that is mainly targeting Iraqis and other Arabs. Jordanians and Arabs elsewhere who want to fight against terrorism — and have done so for decades — find themselves in the awkward position of not knowing whether this is best done by supporting or opposing Anglo-American policies in Iraq.
The larger dilemma that confounds all concerned — Jordanians, other Arabs, Americans, Israelis, and our friends in Micronesia who have been peculiarly quiet recently — is that military-based policies in Iraq, Palestine and other places that are marketed as promoting security in fact tend to promote new forms of violence, and wider circles of vulnerability. That Jordan, the paradigm of security and proven friend of the West, should now be the latest victim of this dilemma suggests just how intense and virulent it is.
This also reminds us all — Arabs, Americans, Israelis — of the urgent need to review our penchant to seek security by military means, instead of through political dignity, the rule of law equally applied to all, and socio-economic concord. These ultimately are the only proven tools that fight terror, and affirm human decency and national security.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 11 November 2005
Word Count: 994
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