America Loses A Friend
The United States has lost one of its best friends in the Middle East, reports CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv. For President Clinton, King Hussein was - in recent years - the glue that held together the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
Whenever there was a crisis - as at the Wye River talks in Maryland last autumn - the U.S. would call in the king, knowing he was trusted by both sides.
But the British-educated king was not always on the West's side. Occasionally he would dabble in anti-Western Arab politics - uniting with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in 1956, and openly supporting Iraq's Saddam Hussein (though they were not in the same family) in the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91.
| Special Coverage on King Hussein | ||
 | Death Of A Peacemaker | |
| The New Hashemite King | |
| Jordan's Thorny Problems | |
| A Queen Perseveres | |
Yet he was clearly more comfortable in the Western camp, and the adulation heaped on him by American and British leaders cheered him up even as cancer was destroying him.
King Hussein was astoundingly adept at managing the basic, constant problem for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: the fact that most of its people are Palestinians.
Hussein's Hashemite ancestors came from the land now known as Saudi Arabia, and the king and his family have always had to dole out favors - and jobs - to Palestinians, while keeping a wary eye on any unruly activists.
Yasser Arafat's P.L.O. tried to take over Jordan in 1970, leading to bloody fighting remembered as "Black September." Some Jordanians fear Arafat will try again, though perhaps this time by peaceful pressure on the new, young King Abdullah.
Hussein lived with a nightmare - a ghost that haunted his peacemaking efforts. At age 15, he witnessed the assassination of his grandfather, King Abdullah: gunned down in Jerusalem by a Palestinian angered by the king's contacts with Israelis.
Within two years, in 1953, Hussein the teenager became monarch, and he was understandably cautious toward the Jewish state to his West.
Historians have recently revealed that he had talks with Israeli leaders starting in 1963, but he insisted on total secrecy until the P.L.O. made peace with Israel in 1993.
The following year, Hussein signed a peace treaty with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- a war hero with whom he shared deep mutual respect. Rabin was assassinated in 1995, and Hussein delivered a teary eulogy at his funeral in Jerusalem.
Without a king of Hussein's stature, Jordan has very few assets. It is a large country with a small population and meager natural resources.
The country's main impotance is its location: nestled uncomfortably between Israel and Iraq, just south of sometimes radical Syria, and still wrestling with the uncertainties of a relationship with Arafat's emerging Palestinian state on the West Bank.
Written by Dan Raviv
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