Jordan-- like much of the rest of the region-- feels to me like an explosion waiting to happen. So far, the King has acted with agility. Getting his supporters very visibly out on the streets of Amman yesterday, before the pro-Islamist people could get their people there, was a smart move. Zarqawi hurt himself badly-- and quite possibly also damaged the anti-US cause more broadly-- by the wanton and inhumane nature of Wednesday's violence. (The counter-productive effect of the purveyors of terror on the building of genuine, mass-based social movements was ever thus.) So maybe the explosion has been staved off from Jordan for a little while?
Still, the whole region of the Middle East is now bubbling with different kinds of political energy. It hasn't looked this volatile and unpredictable since 1970. That was the year when these things happened:
(1) The Palestinian militants of George Habash's PFLP tried and failed to topple the monarchy in Jordan. But they threw the whole country into chaos as they did so.
(2) Gamal Abdel-Nasser died of a heart attack-- in the midst of trying to negotiate an end to the Palestinian-Jordanian battles in Jordan.
(3) Hafez al-Asad, then the commander of the Syrian Air Force and a relative moderate in the Syrian Baath Party, made the crucial decision not to use air power to support Syrian tanks going to aid the Palestinians in Jordan... That decision persuaded the Syrian tank commanders to turn back home; and shortly afterward Asad made the coup that brought his much less adventurous branch of the Baath to power in Damascus.
In 1969, Qadhafi had seized power in Libya and Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq... So 1969 and 1970 were really transformative years for the politics of the whole region. Jordan was a crucial locus and engine of much of that change.
Since 1970, as I've written before, the political systems of nearly all these polities became quite ossified. Thirty months ago, Washington took a sledgehammer to the Iraqi part of the region's bone-set, and now, much of the ossification seems to be shattering. The whole Middle East will most likely see a lot of deep, rapid, and hard-to-predict change in the two years ahead. This much is easy to predict though: these changes will look nothing like the rosy scripts of spread of US-style democratization and US influence touted by the war-planners before March 2003 and since.
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