Only two days before the American diplomat Laurence Foley was shot dead just outside his home here, in a beautiful neighborhood of golden stone houses and bougainvillea vines, a young American businessman was sharing his thoughts with me about this moment in history for Yanks abroad.
“We read all these reports from Washington about conferences on `After Saddam,What?’ and they are like something out of another world to us,” he said, a note of sadness in his voice. “Back there, they just assume that all of this is going to work. And what about us? What’s going to happen to us? We’ll be the first targets for everybody here.”
Within a mere 48 hours, his fears were realized. Foley, the 60-year-old official for USAID in Jordan, a former Peace Corpsman whose life was characterized by bringing relief to others, was killed as he left his home in the early morning to go to work, where he was attempting, among other projects, to bring clean drinking water to Jordanians.
And one more innocent and quintessentially “good American” was lost to our agitated times.
The American Embassy, filled with exceptional officers, immediately eulogized Foley, and the Jordanian Hashemite monarchy, an unusually responsible government, mourned him. But the embassy also said that Foley’s death was “incomprehensible”– and that it surely was not.
In fact, this country’s eerie calm has been misleading. Underneath the deceptively peaceful surface, tempers are at razor’s edge and plots are boiling. Many Islamic groups are waiting their chance to strike, although they are less likely to be Al Qaeda than homegrown groups opposed to Jordan’s 1994 peace with Israel.
Many homes, both Jordanian and Iraqi (about 400,000 Iraqi exiles now live here) have their own Kalashnikovsstashed away, having been smuggled across the Iraqi border. And roughly 1,000 Jordanians came home after the Afghan war, ready to fight again.
At least three important plots have been uncovered and defused by the efficient Jordanian security forces in the last two years. The “Millennium Plot,” planned for the turn of 2000, was to be a deadly gas attack on American and Israeli tourists and others at the Radisson Hotel here and on legendary Mt. Nebo, where history tells us Moses first saw the “promised land.” (Sixteen of the plotters were arrested; 28 still are at large.)
A second plot involved a group, now being tried in military court here, that planned to kidnap American diplomats while they were jogging. The third was to be an attack on King Abdullah and his family when they were vacationing off the coast of Greece on the royal yacht. A small boat was to approach the yacht and then blow it up, but a tip from an informer allowed the royal family to be evacuated in time.
One has to wonder: Is beautiful, peaceful, progressive Jordan, with its often farsighted royal family, in the process of changing from a quiet “listening post” to a prime target for disintegration itself?
When I asked King Abdullah whether he feared the collapse of moderate regimes such as his in the wake of a war with Iraq, he answered soberly. “No,” he said, as we sat in his palace on a hill above the city. “No one would collapse, but the streets would be very nervous and angry–and we would have to take draconian measures that we later would have to pay a high price for.”
But if “incomprehensible” is not the word for the murder of Laurence Foley– public antipathy to U.S. policy in support of Israel is deeply and bitterly embedded in this society, where half the population of 4 million to 5 million is Palestinian–two other words do characterize his death: “soft target.”
First, consider the changes in the Islamist terrorist groups here. Historically, the major group was the traditional Muslim Brothers, who wanted a state based on the Shariah, or law of Islam, but were not nearly so violent as today’s groups. Today one finds a new pattern entirely. It is not the brotherhood, but not Al Qaeda either; rather it is that Muslim groups have splintered here, as indeed across the Arab and the Asian world, and now the splinter groups, far harder for intelligence agencies to uncover, have begun communicating with one another in a kind of ad hoc manner. (One example: The Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which is active in southern Lebanon, now communicates directly with Osama bin Laden’s followers without even bothering to go through Iran.)
The old, organized groups, with authority figures and discipline, tended to attack “hard” targets. These were embassies or military bases that could have clear political meaning and message. The new groups attack “soft” targets–individuals such as Laurence Foley. And there are 900 Americans in Jordan alone.
This also means that:
– (1) the Foley murder may point to a period where these less-disciplined terrorists will hit individual soft targets, and the immediate political meaning of an attack gets lost in the confusion (no one to be taken seriously, for instance, has claimed the Foley murder); and
– (2) the United States will have to consider for its part that, if it is wise, attacking regular military installations and fixed targets will not be effective in responding to these new-style attacks, although changing certain American policies could gradually change this dreary picture.
Perhaps the wisest words I heard came from Rami Khouri, the popular Jordanian columnist. “The war on terror seems to be breeding more, not less,” he said after the Foley murder. “There is no sign that anyone in the U.S. or Israel or the Arab world is addressing the grievances that lie underneath all this.”
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E-mail: gigi-geyer@juno.com
