Amman Dispatch

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In a chilly apartment office in the booming, white-villaed Jordanian capital yesterday, an associate of my contact, a slim aristocratic Jordanian, dressed in a navy sports jacket, discusses in fast English various subjects of interest, his cigarette extended into the air. Downed cups of tea before us, I was writing as fast as I could on a huge notebook whose pages detached as I turned them. And then in the course of discussing why he blocked a certain transaction, he came to: ” … But I would never do anything to harm my idol, the greatest leader, Saddam Hussein.” More professions of love for Saddam followed as I kind of started. But the conversation remained benevolent, and I later found this view that Saddam knew how to manage Iraq better than the current American-propped-up, Shiite-run setup to be pretty widespread and ordinary among the admittedly few Jordanians I got to meet, who were universally incredibly hospitable, and whose borders, under the omnipresent official portraits of a benevolently smiling King Abdullah and his late father King Hussein, are open to pretty much everyone, including some one million of Iraq’s wealthier emigrees, Syrians, Saudis, Gulf investors, Lebanese, Turkish, Americans, Israelis, etc., albeit with an extensive and watchful security superstructure. Massive real estate contruction booms around the city, with towers, new hotels, villas and industrial offices going up. A half hour drive out of the capital, peasants from out of a Biblical scene herd sheep and goats on roadside hills, and petit blue and green decoratively painted Isuzu pick-up trucks deliver wooden crates of fresh tangerines, eggplants, and tomatoes to markets. Another Jordanian I met, Samir, discussing the importance of education and his university degree in good English, got to the subject of the Shiites — “who do not practice the right Islam” — as well, and how Saddam “was like a king” who knew how to govern the Iraqis, “who are difficult, they are not easy like the Jordanian people.”

When I opened the floaty blinds in my hotel room, I looked across the traffic circle to the huge white stone hotel built apparently by an Iraqi associate of Saddam’s who is rumored to have stolen millions of dollars of his money. I flipped on the TV, featuring an Al Jazeera International program on how hard it is for women in Israel to get a Jewish divorce, and the top news of Gaza Palestinians standing off against Egyptian riot police trying to close the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza, and in the morning, using bulldozers to break down a new opening in the barrier walling them off, and hordes of people crossing through.

This morning, when I needed to buy a charger for my dying cell phone and the Amman shops my driver and I went to were closed, a taxi driver across the street pulled his charger out of the car and gave it to us for a couple dollars. How he figured out the situation so quickly and generously decided to offer his seemed part of a kind of communal local culture of sharing that also included driving between the lanes and making left turns across the incoming traffic, without even a honk or hardly a brake from the oncoming traffic. Beyond the small towns, we flew down the military highway, passing checkpoint after checkpoint. Sawahike Ameriki – American journalist – the driver would tell the soldiers. And they’d peer through his window at me in the backseat, and wave us through. At the border, I filed onto a bus with Arabs, Jews, Israelis, Jordanians, American and British, and we made our way across the half mile to the other side, interrupted by a couple more passport checks and a stop by a young female soldier using mirrors to check the bottom of the bus for bombs. After which, our busload emptied out and filed through Israeli security. In the entrance to the Israeli side of the border crossing with Jordan hangs a black and white framed photo of Israeli prime minsiter Yitzhak Shamir and the late Jordanian King Hussein, who in 1994 made the peace treaty that brought more peace and prosperity to two lands where the people do not necessarily see much eye to eye, except the benefit of such an agreement. “We very much need peace,” my Jordanian driver told me, as a Syrian truck pulled ahead of us, full of Jordanian cucumbers and tomatoes.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate