(Page 2 of 30) - Jordan and the Gulf Wars: Determining Hashemite Foreign Policy in 1990-91 and 2003 authored by Shulman, Debra.

Introduction

Small and resource-poor, Jordan is not a major power in its region, let alone on the world

stage. Nevertheless, among all the Middle Eastern actors involved in the Gulf wars, the foreign
policy of Jordan may well be the most fascinating, and worthy of study. With the same key
protagonists in both wars – a coalition headed by the United States on one side and Iraq on the
other – it is noteworthy that Jordan switched sides, supporting Iraq in the first conflict and the
US-led force in the second. More interesting, however, is the fact that this pattern (support for
Iraq in 1990-91 and the United States in 2003) is contrary to the international and regional norm.
Generally, the US was able to recruit more states to join its multinational coalition in the first
Gulf war, including an impressive number of Arab states which America was keen to retain on
its side. Drumming up support proved a far greater task for the US in the second Gulf war,
especially among potential Middle Eastern allies. It was during this conflict, however, that
Jordan discreetly provided crucial support for the American war effort. For these reasons,
Jordanian foreign policy stands out, and calls for investigation.

In this paper, I seek to elucidate Jordanian foreign policy in the two US-led wars against

Iraq, by providing an explanation for Jordanian behavior which is as parsimonious as possible,
while remaining true to the richness of the historical record. I find that the second image of
international relations, which stipulates that domestic politics is most responsible for generating
foreign policy (Waltz 1959), is borne out in the Jordanian case. Public opinion, economic
pressures, and leadership at the top (especially that of the late King Hussein) played the most
salient roles in shaping Jordanian foreign policy in the two conflicts.

With respect to the first Gulf war,

the liberalization of the Jordanian political system in

the late 1980s provided a window in which public opinion was able to unify and exert powerful
pressure on the regime to side with (or at least avoid siding against) Saddam Hussein. Such a
position was in line with the relatively long-standing pro-Iraq orientation of the Hashemite
regime in Jordan, which had been in place since the 1978 Arab League summit in Baghdad. By
the time the 2003 US-led war against Iraq drew near, however, Amman had become
fundamentally reoriented – economically, politically, and militarily – toward the United States.
This turnaround in Jordanian foreign policy was engineered by King Hussein himself, who made
his intentions clear by joining the American-led peace process at the conclusion of the first Gulf
war. By sending representatives to the Madrid Conference in October 1991, concluding a peace
treaty with Israel in 1994, and simultaneously distancing Jordan from Iraq, King Hussein made
clear that Amman had cast its lot with Washington. When his son Abdallah became king upon
Hussein’s death in 1999, the heir to the Hashemite throne staked his legitimacy upon his nation’s
economic well-being, with the goal that Jordan would thrive, and not just survive. Determined to
be on the side of its American patron, particularly for economic reasons, Amman provided
crucial logistical support in the second Gulf war. At the same time, sensitivity to Jordanian
public opinion, which opposed the US-led war against Iraq, mandated that the regime do so as
quietly as possible, attempting to hide the extent of its support for the American war effort from
the Jordanian people.

The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows. In the second section, I provide an

overview of Jordanian foreign policy during the two US-led wars against Iraq. In the third