King Hussein

Ill with cancer and facing up to his mortality, Jordan's King Hussein is zagging where he zigged. He suggested in recent interviews and a speech to his people that the dictator Saddam Hussein (no kin) had outlived his usefulness to the Iraqi people. Only two years ago, King Hussein upset his patrons and admirers in this country by making common cause with Saddam Hussein against the U.S. He denounced the gulf war. Violating economic sanctions on Iraq was Jordan's best industry.In reversing course, at least rhetorically, King Hussein has not come to his senses.

WASHINGTON - Iraq's new government is a real threat to the Arab world - and the despots controlling other nations in the region know it. As promised, the United States will turn over control of Iraq on June 30 to a new government whose leaders, President Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, were selected recently. Not only will this new Iraqi team put together an assembly to choose the first representative national council for the Iraqi people, but direct elections will be held as early as January, marking the first time the population of an Arab nation may achieve genuine freedom.

When King Hussein of Jordan finally came down from the fence, it was on the wrong side. His speech to his people last week was a ringing condemnation of American bombing and Arab partners in the coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait. He misrepresented the war as against all Arabs and Islam. Then he went on American Sunday television and tried to reclaim his pained neutrality. It didn't work. The days of radically contradictory speeches to different audiences are over. The world has become too small for that.

WADI ARAVA, Israeli-Jordanian Border - In a region usually defined by the way people are separated, whether by barbed wire or walls, there is one place where a barrier is coming down. Workers have cut the fence marking the border between Israel and Jordan south of the Dead Sea to make way for an educational institution that will straddle the border. The cornerstone is to be laid tomorrow for the $30 million Bridging the Rift Center, a science and technology collaborative backed by Cornell and Stanford universities where participants will study plant and animal species to build what the researchers call a Library of Life.

KING Hussein is being eulogized around the world for his role as an Arab-Israeli peacemaker and international statesman. But the king's real legacy, and what explains the outpouring of grief by his own people, is the admirable way he ran his own backyard. The way he played the roles of governor, mayor and even local Bedouin chief is what really set him apart as an Arab leader.Indeed, as a geopolitician, the king had his shortcomings. He let Nasser and the nationalist euphoria of the Arab street bamboozle him into the 1967 war. He talked himself out of the 1973 war, when he might have actually recaptured part of his lost kingdom from Israel.

That historic handshake in Washington between leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel has already resulted in a decision by the Clinton administration to commit a preliminary $250 million in economic aid for the Gaza strip and the Jericho area of the West Bank. Further commitments are expected from the World Bank.The apparent new order also radically alters the role of Jordan, dramatized the other day by another Washington handshake under President Clinton's auspices. This one linked Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Crown Prince Hassan, brother and foreign minister to Jordan's King Hussein.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly met in secret with Jordan's King Hussein Sunday night, amid signs the monarch is worried about the Israeli-Palestinian agreement.Mr. Rabin's meeting with the king -- on a boat in the Gulf of Eilat or the king's summer palace in nearby Aqaba -- was widely interpreted here as an attempt to soothe the fears of the monarch about the new Palestinian self-government.King Hussein is worried that the creation of an entity run by the Palestine Liberation Organization will undermine his authority with the Palestinians who make up a majority of his country's population.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Every day for a week now, dozens o towering and colorful hot-air balloons have been drifting into this Arab kingdom, touching down at a remote desert site in southern Jordan for a lavish celebration of King Hussein's 57th birthday.From miles around, Bedouin camel herders have driven the pride of their flocks to the site in ancient Wadi Rum, where the king's forebears fought a decisive battle alongside Lawrence of Arabia, eight decades ago when the dream of a single great Arab nation was still alive.

AMMAN, Jordan -- King Hussein of Jordan said yesterday that Arab alarm over the change of government in Israel has been overwrought, and he expressed confidence that Benjamin Netanyahu's election would not undermine the quest for peace in the Middle East.The king sounded far more upbeat than other Arab officials who have spoken out since the election Wednesday. His remarks seemed to reflect the deep commitment he has shown to partnership with Israel since the two countries signed a peace accord two years ago."

AMMAN, Jordan -- Although King Hussein's halfhearted neutrality has kept Jordan out of the gulf war, it also has led his nation to the brink of economic collapse.Exports are off 80 percent to 90 percent, virtually shutting down the mainstay industries in potash and phosphates. Oil reserves have dwindled to a one-month supply, even with consumption plodding along at half the normal rate. The government is studying rationing.Tourism has disappeared, unless one counts the few hundred foreign journalists in Amman.

A JOKE MAKING the rounds in the Middle East back in the 1970s placed King Hussein of Jordan - having gone to the great beyond - in the company of Satan in hell. The devil was showing the Hashemite monarch the rooms where the doomed would spend eternity, so he could choose one for himself. In the first room Hussein found King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia writhing on the floor, unwashed, tormented by vermin and bugs. Hussein shuddered and asked to see the next room. In the next room, Syrian President Hafez el Assad was being pulled apart on a medieval rack.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The regime of Saddam Hussein is dead. Its trappings and underpinnings are dying under the footfalls of U.S. soldiers. At the dictator's propaganda headquarters, his dark eyes stare up from thousands of photographs scattered on the filthy floors. The chronicles of three decades of rule, of Hussein receiving Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan and kissing babies and mustachioed commandos, have been pawed through and stomped upon by soldiers after being looted by Iraqi civilians.

Leroy Ingles, 84, hand-picked by Adm. Hyman G. Rickover to serve as the chief of the Navy's first nuclear submarine, died April 12. In 1954, Admiral Rickover picked him to serve as the first chief aboard USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Mr. Ingles later served aboard one of the Navy's first nuclear missile submarines, the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Marshall Habes al-Majali, 87, a former commander who led Arab armies against Jewish forces in 1948 and later crushed a rebellion led by Yasser Arafat, died Sunday of heart failure in Amman, Jordan.

WASHINGTON - In 1964, they were all midshipmen in The Yard of the U.S. Naval Academy, three diverse personalities traveling along different roads that would one day intersect on the world stage. Joseph Prueher, class of 1964, an easygoing Tennessee native who rowed crew along the graceful Severn River, graduated that June. Dennis Blair, class of 1968, the son of a Navy captain and a brainy soccer player who would stand at the top of his class, arrived as a midshipman that year. Richard Armitage, class of 1967, overlapped them both.

Queen Noor of Jordan had a question for Jamaal Jordan of Baltimore.She'd come thousands of miles for this meeting and was hanging on every word, regal and blonde, earrings glittering. He, on the other hand, was 17, wearing gray sweats and a white T-shirt and had just said how tired he was of hearing that rap music makes people take drugs or shoot people.So then how about television shows, the queen asked. Were they a bad influence?"Naw, man," Jamaal said. "They got a PG-13 rating."So it went yesterday at the Pleasant View Gardens Boys and Girls Club on East Fayette Street, as 11 students told the queen and a handful of other international dignitaries about what it's like growing up in a rough neighborhood.

Jordan's king goes undercover to hear citizens' complaintsAMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's King Abdullah, showing glimpses of the common touch that made his father, King Hussein, hugely popular, dressed up as an old man to investigate operations at a duty-free zone.The monarch, who assumed the throne in February, listened to complaints and harsh criticisms of a bloated bureaucracy. "How can an application take four days to process when there are 40 customs officials at 40 windows?" one investor was quoted as saying.

ZELAFON, Israel -- Two fathers, an Arab king and an Israeli factory worker met yesterday in a house of grief to mourn the death of a 13-year-old daughter.King Hussein of Jordan knelt at the feet of Yisrael Fatihi, who sat on floor cushions in the custom of Jewish mourning, and told him, "Your loss is my loss, my personal loss."The king's visit to the tidy stucco house of the Fatihi family was his first stop on an extraordinary series of condolence calls to the families of seven Israeli schoolgirls fatally shot last week by a Jordanian soldier at a tourist spot on the Israel-Jordan border.

WITH PALESTINIAN elections Jan. 20 and talks with Syria expected to resume two days later, Israel needed to demonstrate the blessings of peace, and did.Israel's release of some 800 Palestinian prisoners from Hamas and other groups opposing the peace process, on their pledge to refrain from violence, went a long way to meet the goal of 1,200 before the Palestinian election. The sheer joy of their families at their release is what PLO leader Yasser Arafat needs, even if many oppose him, to demonstrate the benefits of his peace with Israel.

FOR 38 YEARS, Hassan II was a constitutional king of Morocco. He wrote the constitution, but it did not constrain his autocratic impulses. Common sense, shrewdness and a deft political touch did.On balance, he was a force for good. Like his contemporary, King Hussein of Jordan who died in February, King Hassan thwarted assassination schemes, rolled with the punches and knew when to make concessions.His death Friday at age 70 ended a period of progress and stability in his country of 29 million people.