Our Last Best Chance Part 6

One difference between politics in the Middle East and in Europe and America is its deeply personal nature. In the West, international affairs tend to be conducted through inst.i.tutions and permanent cadres of civil servants who provide policy continuity as political leaders step on and off the stage. Personal relations tend to be less important than the correct set of talking points.

But in my part of the world, people like to get to know one another face-to-face. We pride ourselves on our culture of hospitality, which often means a lot of eating and socializing. In the West, it is perfectly acceptable to meet with a head of state for twenty minutes, conduct some business, and move on. But in the Arab world it is considered rude to visit for a short time. The appropriate way to host honored guests is to invite them to a grand dinner. The real work gets done in informal conversations after the dinner, not in official meetings.

I knew I would have to build personal relations.h.i.+ps with my fellow Arab leaders. The centers of power in the Middle East are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq, due to their size and historical importance, and the Gulf countries, because of their wealth and influence. I would need to meet the leaders of all of these nations to establish good relations. So in late March 1999 I began a whirlwind tour of the region, stopping first in Egypt, where I met President Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt has for centuries been a major center of regional power due to its size, history, and religious inst.i.tutions. Cairo is home to Al Azhar University, which at over a thousand years old is one of the world's most ancient, and Egyptians fondly refer to their country in Arabic as um al dunya um al dunya-"mother of the world."

The Mubaraks have been family friends since the early 1980s, and I knew Hosni Mubarak and his son Gamal well. Mubarak was extremely warm when he greeted me. We talked about some of the challenges we were both facing, and in particular about the difficulty of providing jobs and opportunities for a young population facing terrible poverty and unemployment. Mubarak mentioned how much the region had suffered from Rabin's a.s.sa.s.sination a few years earlier. Rabin had been prepared to make considerable sacrifices for peace, and we both reflected on how the entire Middle East would have benefited from his forceful determination to come to terms with the Palestinians. Looking across our borders into Israel, neither of us saw a leader with the strength to bring his countrymen along with him as Rabin could have done. The stalled peace process and how to reinvigorate it were, and would be in every other meeting we would later have, major items on our agenda. We talked about the need to push for a breakthrough that would put the region back on track toward a settlement on the basis of the two-state solution.

Not long after that, in early April, I paid a visit to King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and his brother Crown Prince Abdullah in Jeddah. Crown Prince Abdullah had a.s.sumed a great deal of responsibility for ruling Saudi Arabia in recent years due to King Fahd's failing health. I first met Prince Abdullah in the late 1970s when, on holiday from Deerfield, I went with my father and Feisal to Taif, a mountain town that is the summer seat of the Saudi Royal Court. I sat next to him at a dinner and remember reflecting on the fact that this man, almost forty years older than me, and I shared the same name. He had been a crack shot and told me stories about putting out cigarettes with his pistol. He was also a keen rider and regaled me with accounts of his horses.

But although Crown Prince Abdullah and I had a good personal rapport, the relations.h.i.+p between Jordan and Saudi Arabia had historically been a delicate one. The Hashemite family originally came from the Hijaz and had ruled over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for more than seven hundred years, until 1925, when the Hashemites lost the area to Ibn Saud, who founded the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. My father's relations.h.i.+p with the Saudis had been very strong, but it was damaged by the position he had taken in the Gulf War in 1991. Never one to let politics trump personal friends.h.i.+p, however, Crown Prince Abdullah visited my father at his house in Was.h.i.+ngton in the last months of his life and brought him Zamzam water, which comes from a well in the holy city of Mecca. He poured the water for him as a good omen, and also brought a copy of the Holy Quran, a gesture that deeply touched my father, who spoke of it more than once with warm appreciation in the days that followed.

I had been to Saudi Arabia several times during my days in Special Forces and had gotten to know some of the younger generation, including two of Crown Prince Abdullah's sons, Mutaib and Abdulaziz. We had spoken about the historic clashes between our two families and how we should put history to one side and focus on strengthening our relations.h.i.+p.

Abdullah, who succeeded King Fahd in 2005, is a rare mix of traditional and modern leader. He is a leader with an instinctive understanding of what makes people tick in our region. With values firmly rooted in his country's heritage and culture, he has a farreaching vision for the future of his people. Saudi Arabia is a conservative society that has traditionally enforced a strict segregation between men and women. But on September 5, 2009, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia's first coeducational university, located on the Red Sea near Jeddah, opened its doors. And when a senior Saudi cleric criticized the coed nature of the university, King Abdullah removed him from his post. Under his reign, Saudi Arabia has witnessed tremendous development in education, telecommunications, and infrastructure. His policies have led to significant diversification of the economy and facilitated the growth of the private sector. King Abdullah initiated major reforms in the judicial system, restructuring courts and introducing a supreme court of justice to achieve uniformity in rulings. For the first time in the country's history, a woman was appointed as a deputy minister in the cabinet.

King Abdullah is the kind of man it takes a while to get to know, but once you have built a relations.h.i.+p, it is generally very strong. He likes to watch the news while he eats, and it is a sign that you are an honored guest if he feels relaxed enough in your company to host you in a more informal setting with the TV on. He is a very gracious host, and at state dinners when I came to visit he would sometimes walk beside me, surveying the various traditional dishes of rice, lamb, and pastries, pause beside a particularly appetizing dish, taste it, then put a little on my plate. He has been a close friend, and a strong supporter of Jordan.

Later that month I went to Oman, where I met with Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al Said in the desert near Nizwa, a town some 120 miles southwest of the capital, Muscat. Every year, the sultan goes for a three-month tour through the different regions of Oman, accompanied by his government ministers. A fellow Sandhurst graduate, the sultan is a modest and meticulous man who is always immaculately groomed. He pays close attention to the way his country is run, and moved Oman from the twelfth to the twenty-first century without losing sight of its rich heritage as a seafaring country. (Tradition has it that Sinbad the Sailor was born in a small fis.h.i.+ng village northwest of Muscat.) The sultan of Oman has remarkably few enemies. A testament to his evenhandedness and diplomatic skill is his ability to stay on friendly terms with both the Iranians and the Americans. His relations.h.i.+p with my father was very strong, in part because my father sent Jordanian troops to help defeat the rebels who led an insurgency against him in the 1960s and 1970s. The Dhofar rebellion began as a protest against the rule of the sultan's father, Said Bin Taimur, but by 1970, when the current sultan gained power, the rebels had embraced Marxism and were supported by China and the Soviet Union. The rebellion was finally defeated in 1975, and Sultan Qaboos began to modernize his country after that.

Focusing on education, the role of women, and political stability, he took pains to ensure that his country developed efficient inst.i.tutions and was forward-looking. His government always has a five-year plan and Oman has set aside funds for the day its oil runs out. The sultan plays a discreet role on the world stage, but his standing in the region is extremely high. The Western leaders who know him always pay careful attention to his words. When my father pa.s.sed away, one of the people who was most supportive and helpful to me was the sultan. He always gives wise advice and often has a completely original way of looking at a situation. In my early years as king especially, I benefited greatly from his counsel.

I continued on to the United Arab Emirates, meeting with Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the emir of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE. A traditional ruler, Sheikh Zayed, who by then was in his early eighties, had a disarming personal manner. He presided over Abu Dhabi's and the rest of the UAE's amazing transformation into one of the Arab world's most modern countries, with vibrant business, cultural, and educational centers. When he died in 2004, the region lost a great leader, known for his wisdom, vision, and compa.s.sion. His successor, Sheikh Khalifa, has carried on his father's tradition of ruling with tolerance and wisdom. Sheikh Zayed was very supportive of Jordan and was always there if I needed help. I am close friends with his son Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Next, I went to Sirte, a coastal town 250 miles east of Tripoli, in Libya, to meet Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. When he took power in a military coup in 1969, Qadhafi allied himself with various radical factions across the region. In 1982, he devised a plan to smuggle ground-to-air missiles into Jordan and to position them at the Amman and Aqaba airports to shoot down my father's plane. The man entrusted by Qadhafi with carrying out the plot, the Libyan amba.s.sador to Jordan, was horrified. Knowing he would be put in jail or worse if he refused, he pretended to carry out his orders. But as the day of the plot approached, he defected to Jordan and told my father about it.

The next year, to the astonishment of many Westerners, my father invited Colonel Qadhafi to come to Amman for a public reconciliation. On June 10, 1983, a jet plane landed at Amman's military airport, and Qadhafi descended from the plane accompanied by a group of female bodyguards, young women wearing Cuban-style combat shorts with safari vests, sporting small peaked caps over afro hairdos, and carrying guns. After two hours of talks, my father invited Qadhafi to spend the night in Jordan before continuing on his journey to Syria. To an outsider, this might seem like an odd way to treat a man who the year before had tried to kill you. But my father always believed in keeping one's friends close and one's enemies even closer.

He knew that the Middle East was a crowded neighborhood, and his three decades as king had taught him that today's enemy may be tomorrow's friend. There was no sense in bearing grudges. Like members of an extended family, the leaders of the twenty-two Arab countries were going to be dealing with one another for many years to come. Over time, my father and Qadhafi became closer, to the point where, when I was commander of Special Operations, he would send me to Libya to discuss military cooperation. On these trips I got to know Qadhafi's sons.

My father took an equally enlightened approach in his handling of domestic opponents. Jordan is a small country, and he knew he would have to live with the people he disciplined and their families, too. The traditional punishment in the Middle East for plotting to overthrow a government is execution. But my father would often exile the people who plotted against him for a few years and then welcome them back to Jordan. He would sometimes even offer the returning plotter a job in government. It was his way of showing forgiveness and inspiring loyalty. The next time they might think twice before seeking to undermine the man who had shown them such kindness. I had learned much from watching my father lead our country, but I knew that with his pa.s.sing I would have to find my own approach.

In late April I visited Syria. Relations between Syria and Jordan had been strained since my father had signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. Hafez al-a.s.sad was furious that Jordan had not waited for him to conclude his own negotiations with the Israelis over the Golan Heights, which had been seized by the Israeli army in 1967. a.s.sad would not visit Amman after the treaty until my father's funeral. So my visit to Damascus was a chance to recalibrate relations.

I knew a little about a.s.sad and what kind of man he was. In the late 1980s, when tensions between him and Saddam Hussein were running high-Saddam was entrenched in a lengthy, violent war with Iran, and a.s.sad was siding with the Iranians-my father, working through back channels, persuaded the two men to meet, following Winston Churchill's advice that "to jaw jaw is always better than to war war." The site he chose was Al Jafr, a remote desert village about 140 miles south of Amman. At that time, I was a military officer flying Cobra helicopters and my unit was part of the aerial security. The Royal Guard cordoned off the meeting site, stationing armed troops along the perimeter and around the landing strip. We separated the compound into two halves, one side for the Syrians and the other for the Iraqis, and prepared accommodations.

Once preparations were completed, my father beckoned me to join him. "Stay with me and watch what happens," he said. Looking back, I realize that he wanted me to have a glimpse into international diplomacy, a world far removed from my duties as an army officer.

Both Syria and Iraq were then ruled by the Baath Party, which espoused a form of secular Arab socialism. In the late 1960s, the Baath Party, which was formed in Syria, split. The party's founders were driven into exile-moving to Iraq, where they soon drew a following and took over the government in 1968. Relations between Baathist Syria and Iraq fluctuated over the years between high tension and collaboration, and by the mid-1980s, when my father brought them together, these two strong military powers were jockeying for regional primacy.

Late in the afternoon of the appointed day, the sound of an aircraft engine floated across the desert, and then several jets with Syrian flags on their tails landed and taxied down the makes.h.i.+ft runway. Accompanied by around fifty soldiers carrying AK-47 a.s.sault rifles, Hafez al-a.s.sad emerged from his plane. My father greeted him and escorted him and his delegation to the Syrian half of the compound.

About half an hour later several more planes landed, this time bearing Iraqi colors. Saddam Hussein marched out of the lead plane, accompanied by some fifty heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. My father welcomed Saddam and showed him to the Iraqi delegation's area.

I watched the proceedings with Dr. Samir Farraj, my father's personal physician. As dusk fell, our soldiers set up bright spotlights to illuminate the whole area like daylight. We did not want any confusion caused by shadows in the night.

Saddam and a.s.sad went into the meeting room my father had prepared, while my father waited outside with the rest of us. Several hours pa.s.sed, during which he kept sending in more coffee and food. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, the meeting ended. My father took Saddam to one side and asked how it had gone. Saddam wearily said that he had spoken for no more than fifteen minutes during the whole time. Relegating someone with Saddam's ma.s.sive ego almost entirely to listening was not a good idea. Despite all my father's efforts, he could not persuade the two men to reconcile, and they left the desert meeting still on hostile terms. But both leaders respected my father's attempt to act as a peacemaker. And I had learned a valuable lesson about the need for patience in diplomacy.

I had been invited to visit President Clinton in Was.h.i.+ngton in May, and when I saw President a.s.sad in Damascus, he asked me to relay a message to Clinton. He said he was ready to talk to the Americans. I told him I would convey his message and we discussed the peace process and water rights. We also talked about his son, Bashar, whom I met on the visit. We got along well. Hafez al-a.s.sad was nearing seventy, and I think he was excited by the prospect of his son and me becoming friends.

President a.s.sad died unexpectedly just over a year after my visit and was succeeded by his son. Though Bashar and I do not agree on every aspect of regional politics, our countries are collaborating more than ever before. We consult on the peace process, and are expanding our cooperation in many areas, including regional energy projects. We are encouraging the private sectors to forge stronger links. Even our young children have established ties. When we first visited, all the children were very shy, but it didn't take them long to discover a common interest in Super Mario Brothers-and now they get along well.

The last stop on my tour of the neighborhood was Gaza, where I had my first official meeting with Arafat in my role as king. Arafat had come to Amman for my father's funeral, but we did not have any discussions then.

My father and Arafat had become closer toward the end of their lives. I would sometimes attend their meetings and my father would laugh, watching me standing helpless while Arafat showered me with kisses. By then, having won the n.o.bel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and s.h.i.+mon Peres in 1994, he had taken on the role of elder statesman.

As we gathered for lunch, each accompanied by our respective delegations, Arafat said, "The Palestinian people of the West Bank and the East Bank welcome you to Gaza!" My people bristled, as Arafat was implying that he still retained some political influence in Jordan, the "East Bank," invoking memories of his failed attempt to overthrow my father in 1970.

Arafat was also referring to the large number of Jordanians of Palestinian origin. He never gave up his claim to represent all Palestinians who had been chased from their homes in Israel or forced to flee during the wars. During and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, a wave of refugees from Palestine crossed into Jordan, significantly increasing Jordan's then population of 433,000. These refugees were given Jordanian citizens.h.i.+p. A second wave of Palestinians crossed the River Jordan after the 1967 war-they already had Jordanian nationality as they mostly lived in the West Bank, which belonged to Jordan. In 1999, around 43 percent of Jordan's population was of Palestinian origin.

I let his curious comment pa.s.s, but later, in a tete-a-tete, I spoke my mind. "The Palestinian people will always have 110 percent of my support in the search for a Palestinian state," I said. "And once the Palestinians achieve their right to statehood, Jordanians of Palestinian origin will at last have the right to choose where they want to live. Those who want to be Palestinian citizens and move to Palestine will be free to do so, and all of our citizens who choose to stay in Jordan, whatever their background or origin, will remain Jordanian citizens. Their loyalty will be to the Jordanian flag, not the Palestinian, which for some is not the case today."

I saw a flicker of a smile pa.s.s across the old freedom fighter's lips. He had been testing my authority with his reference to the "East Bank," and my vigorous response I think surprised him.

We moved from discussing inter-Arab politics to the attempt to revive the Wye Accords and the implications of Ehud Barak's election as prime minister of Israel. Arafat and I both agreed that it was important for the Arabs to maintain a united front in any negotiations with the Israelis. We discussed the possibility that the new Israeli prime minister would try to split the Arabs by opening peace negotiations with Syria. Arafat, who was curious about my conversation with a.s.sad, worried that the Syrian leader would respond positively to any overtures by the Israelis, at the expense of the Palestinians. I told him that I did not believe a.s.sad would accept such a deal. I returned to Jordan curious to see whether Barak would live up to our hopes and expectations.

Chapter 15.

Transforming Jordan When I became king in February 1999, my first challenge was not war or a terrorist attack. It was how to pull Jordan's economy out of a short-term crisis and put it onto a path of strong and resilient growth.

My father had left the country a rich inheritance of peace, political stability, and a strong international standing, but economically Jordan was struggling. Throughout the 1990s the economy had suffered from the fallout of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Most Gulf countries had perceived his efforts to stop the war as siding with Saddam, and as a result they dramatically cut back on their aid, loans, and investments in Jordan. The return of large numbers of expatriate Jordanian workers from Gulf countries, mainly from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, meant that we no longer benefited from their remittances, and the imposition of sanctions on Iraq hit us particularly hard, since Iraq had been our main trading partner and the princ.i.p.al source of our oil, supplied on concessional terms.

Economic growth slowed, and the government had to rely on foreign borrowing to underpin its spending. By the end of 1998, foreign debt had risen to over 100 percent of GDP. We would soon be unable to service the debt. Jordan turned to the International Monetary Fund, as it had done in the previous debt crisis in 1989, and in the month after I became king we secured new financial support from the IMF, which was followed by a rescheduling of our debt to the Paris Club of international creditors.

The immediate difficulty was resolved, but we needed more than a quick patch. From my time in the army, speaking to soldiers, traveling to their villages, and meeting their families, I knew that many of our people were struggling financially. My priority was, and remains, to secure a decent living for Jordan's citizens. I set for my government the goal of laying the foundation for the strong and stable economic growth that would make this possible.

This was not an easy task for a small, vulnerable economy. Jordan has no oil and its other natural resources are limited. Both water and agricultural land are scarce. Its industrial base has never been very strong, and with a population of only four and a half million in 1999, it was unlikely to become an economic powerhouse. We would have to learn to compete more efficiently in this new era of globalization, as dismantling the barriers to trade and investment had exposed countries to ever fiercer compet.i.tion for markets and investment.

I a.s.sembled a team of talented economic advisers, including Ba.s.sem Awadallah, a former investment banker and economist with a PhD from the London School of Economics, and Samir Rifai, a Harvard and Cambridge graduate and the son of my father's trusted adviser Zaid Rifai, and asked them to come up with bold, innovative ideas to jump-start Jordan's economic recovery. "We don't have time for complex theories and debate," I told them. "I just want to know the right thing to do." They came back with a host of proposals that built on the measures the IMF's structural adjustment program had introduced at the end of the 1980s: privatize state enterprises, downsize the state bureaucracy, end subsidies, improve education, promote innovative industries, remove trade barriers, and get the public and private sectors to work together to promote industries like information technology, pharmaceuticals, and new media.

We had a basic problem. Much of what we would do was going to be very painful in the short term. Many of the benefits would take years to be felt. And we knew all too well that the previous set of structural adjustment measures had triggered riots. Comfortable with the old ways, many people would resist change-or claim that it could not be attained.

The top priority, my advisers all agreed, was for Jordan to gain admittance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), an international organization formed in 1995 to promote free trade between countries by reducing tariffs on imports and exports. By joining, Jordan would be able to export to over one hundred countries and enjoy greatly reduced tariffs. In return, the other WTO members would be able to export to Jordan on the same terms. Jordan had begun its application in 1995, but the process was stalled. I agreed to do everything I could to get it moving again.

In mid-May 1999, just three months after I became king, I made my first visit to the United States in my new role. My father and President Clinton had been very close. Before the trip I wrote the president a letter, telling him how much my father had valued their friends.h.i.+p. I do not know whether it was the letter or his fond feelings for my father, but when we met at the White House, Clinton was in an expansive mood. "What can I do to help Jordan?" he asked with a broad smile.

"Help us become a member of the World Trade Organization," I said quickly. I do not think he was expecting this at all. Usually countries in dire financial straits simply ask for more direct aid. But I did not want handouts. I wanted us to have a chance to help ourselves. Clinton took note of my request but gave no immediate answer. We continued our discussions of the subject with the U.S. government, which finally supported our application. Eleven months later, in April 2000, Jordan became a member of the WTO.

Switching from economics to regional politics, I told the president about my recent trip to Damascus and of President Hafez al-a.s.sad's desire to meet with him. Clinton smiled, thanked me for pa.s.sing on the message, and said he would see what he could do. True to his word, he met a.s.sad for the first time in Geneva the following year. Syrian-Israeli peace was the main subject of the meeting, which failed to achieve any breakthroughs. a.s.sad insisted on full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the borders of June 4, 1967. Israel, in previous talks with the Syrians, had demanded alterations to this border. Clinton's attempts to change a.s.sad's position failed and the stalemate persisted.

The U.S. government was a gracious host, but the contrast to my previous visits was striking. I could no longer slip out to catch a movie with a couple of friends. Instead, as I found out when I went to see The Matrix The Matrix, I would have a six-car Secret Service motorcade in tow, sirens blaring. If I wanted a quiet night at the movies, I would have to shed my security detail and go in secret.

Some Middle Eastern leaders think that dealing with the United States is just about one's relations.h.i.+p with the president. In our neighborhood, it is essential to know the heads of state personally, as power tends to be highly centralized. If the top man says he wants something, it gets done. But in the United States, political power is much more dispersed. In my time at Deerfield and Georgetown, I had learned a lot about the complexities of the American political system.

I was in the United States on a military course in 1985 when my father met with President Ronald Reagan. I saw him right after the meeting and he was elated, because Reagan had agreed to provide extensive support for Jordan in the form of a defensive arms package. I warned my father that such a proposal was unlikely to get through Congress. But he thought Reagan's personal agreement would be enough. "I have the word of the president of the United States!" he told me. But the truth was that without the consent of Congress, even the word of the president will not get things done.

A visit to America, done right, takes at least a week. First, you have to meet with the president and vice president, then with the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and, ideally, the national security adviser. Next come senior intelligence officials and military officers. Finally, on the political side, you also have to engage both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I typically spend two long days in Congress, meeting with members of up to ten different Senate and House committees, both Republicans and Democrats. In America, you have got to work the system. It is not just about getting the green light from the White House. The challenge is to have the support of both the White House and Capitol Hill.

Back in Jordan there were many pressing domestic problems to deal with. I was eager to improve the lives of Jordanians, but I suspected that privatizing state-owned industries and holding officials and civil servants accountable to more vigorous sets of performance measures would not sit well with them. First I would try to make more tangible improvements that they could see and understand.

One example of the magnitude of the challenges we faced was the Al Bas.h.i.+r Hospital in Amman. As the largest state-run public hospital in the capital, it was in great demand. But when I visited the hospital in April, it was in an awful state. The wards were crowded and dirty, and none of the elevators in the building worked. Doctors had long lines of patients waiting for them and very little support. I was appalled and told the health minister to fix the situation-quickly.

In the army, when you say do something, it gets done. But dealing with the civilian government ministries, I was learning, required a different approach. First of all, armies march in time, so everything happens on a fixed schedule: you attack at a certain time, you wake up at a certain time, and you expect something to be done by a certain time. With the government, that is not necessarily the case.

I made a follow-up visit a couple of weeks later, and nothing had been done. The elevators were still broken, and the place was still deeply unhygienic. I told the health minister that I was serious about seeing improvements, and made a third visit after that, on returning from my trip to the United States.

With my third visit the hospital management began to get the message, and conditions started to improve. But inefficient public services were a challenge across the whole country, not just in Amman. A lot of information had started to come in to the Royal Court about other problems. To my frustration, many times when I raised these issues with the relevant ministers, they would tell me that the reports were exaggerated and that everything was fine. I quickly understood that I would need to see with my own eyes what was going on.

My father used to tell me how when he wanted to take the pulse of the country, he would wrap a traditional checkered head scarf around his face and drive round Amman at night in a battered old taxi, picking people up. He would ask every new pa.s.senger, "How's the economy going? What do you think of the Palestinian-Israeli situation? What do you think of the king's new policy?" One time, in order to provoke conversation, my father told his pa.s.senger, "You know, this king is rubbish." The man pulled a knife on him and said, "Listen, you speak badly about the king and I'm going to cut your throat right here!" He was only able to calm the man down by pulling off his head scarf and revealing his true ident.i.ty.

I decided I would find a way of visiting government inst.i.tutions discreetly to see what was really going on. I had several disguises made, which, because I still use them, I will not describe in detail here. But suffice it to say that anybody who met me in one of my disguises would never mistake me for a king.

I went to government offices and facilities across the country, from the north to the south, incognito. Accompanied only by a skeleton security detail, I visited hospitals, tax offices, police stations, and many other parts of the bureaucracy. Occasionally my secret visits were discovered by the public, but more often they were not. If I found people were being treated badly, I would raise the matter with the relevant minister back in Amman, and now I knew when they were not telling me the whole story.

One time I visited a tax office that was in complete shambles. People's records were lying around everywhere in boxes on the floor. Wanting to see what would happen, I walked over to a box, grabbed a handful of files, and headed for the door. Sure enough, n.o.body stopped me. I don't think any of the civil servants even noticed.

The next day I called the ministry and demanded to know why it was handling people's confidential information in such a sloppy way. One of the bureaucrats argued that I was misinformed. When I pulled out the tax records I had taken, he turned white and went very quiet. That visit was made public. For one thing, I had to return the tax records. And I wanted everyone to know that I was pus.h.i.+ng hard for reform. Government employees sometimes get complacent if they feel n.o.body is watching them. My military training had taught me that expecting a lot from people delivers the best results.

Over time, my penchant for secret visits resulted in "Elvis" sightings. For each visit I actually made, there were reports that I had been spotted in another thirty or forty places. We heard of one such sighting at a tomato-packing plant up in the north of Jordan. A long line of farmers were waiting in their trucks for the plant to process their cargo, which might spoil in the sun. One farmer, as he pulled in to the gate, said he thought he had seen the king in disguise, waiting in one of the trucks. Whether he actually thought he had seen me or was just being cunning, no one will ever know, but the effect was the same. Pretty soon the line started moving at top speed.

Across the country civil servants started panicking. If the next person in line could be the king, they figured, they had better treat everyone like royalty. The message to the bureaucrats was: you are there to serve the people, not the other way around. One newspaper ran a cartoon showing me dressed as a road sweeper, a prisoner, a beggar, and so on. The secret visits were popular with many Jordanians, but I knew that I could not end all inefficiencies and make the kind of changes Jordan needed by myself. The private and public sectors would have to begin working together.

On November 26, 1999, we held our first National Economic Forum, a two-day conference at the Movenpick Hotel, on the sh.o.r.es of the Dead Sea. Newly opened that year, the Movenpick had a spa with impressive health facilities, but the delegates had little time for relaxing. They were too busy arguing. We'd invited about 160 representatives from the government and every part of Jordan's private sector: industrial farmers, IT companies, pharmaceutical companies, and many others. What the business community was asking for from the government seemed like common sense, but when the meetings expanded to include civil servants, the two groups started shouting at each other.

Halfway through the first day, it was clear that this approach wasn't working. So I tried a different approach. I let the delegates know that n.o.body would be leaving until they came up with some solutions. I would lock the door and throw away the key until they sorted things out. When they realized that I was serious, and that they would be stuck there for the next two days unless they came to terms, the delegates put aside their differences and started coming up with a plan that would benefit all of Jordan. There was no press, so everybody could speak openly.

The ideas ranged from the simple to the ambitious. One of the simplest was to introduce a two-day weekend. At that time, everyone in Jordan worked a six-day week, with Friday as a holiday. But the question being debated was, if we went to a two-day weekend like most of the world, what should the extra day off be? The Islamic holy day is Friday, so a lot of people wanted Thursday and Friday as the weekend. But many of the businessmen worked with companies in the West, so they wanted the weekend to be Friday and Sat.u.r.day. After a healthy debate, the delegates settled on Friday and Sat.u.r.day.

We were not the only ones looking to move our economy more into line with international markets. Four years later, in July 2003, Qatar followed suit, s.h.i.+fting to a Friday-Sat.u.r.day weekend. They were followed by the UAE, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Bahrain in 2006, and Kuwait in 2007.

The delegates discussed more ambitious goals, including building on the success of Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs). Formed by the U.S. government in 1996, two years after the Jordan-Israel peace treaty was signed, these were manufacturing zones from which the products could enter the United States duty-free so long as at least 20 percent of the content was produced in either Israel or Jordan. The zones supplied U.S. companies such as Gap, JCPenney, and Levi Strauss. Exports from Jordan to the United States had shot up from virtually nothing to $18 million in 1998, and the delegates wondered how we could raise them still further.

By the end of the conference the delegates had agreed on an ambitious economic development plan, including changing laws to make things easier for private companies and encouraging investment, privatization, and educational reform. They also agreed to set up the Economic Consultative Council, which would have representatives from both government and the private sector, to continue the debate and to implement reforms. Unlike many countries in the Middle East, Jordan has no oil and comparatively few natural resources. So the delegates knew that we would have to develop the true wealth of Jordan-our people-if we want to prosper in a compet.i.tive global economy.

Two days after the conference ended, the World Trade Organization held its annual meeting in Seattle. While protesters raged outside, tossing insults and brickbats at baton-wielding riot police, inside the convention center the Jordanian delegation lobbied hard to be allowed to join. While some in America were violently rejecting globalization, we were rus.h.i.+ng to embrace it. The next month, WTO members voted on our application, and Jordan joined on April 11, 2000. Our efforts to modernize our economy were gaining momentum.

In January 2000, I went to Davos, Switzerland, for a meeting of the World Economic Forum, the yearly get-together of leading businessmen, politicians, academics, charity workers, and international bureaucrats. This was the first time I had attended the forum, and I had invited some young Jordanian businessmen and -women to travel with my delegation, hoping they would be able to benefit from the connections they were sure to make among the three thousand delegates.

The guest list was as refined as the mountain air. President Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair were there, as well as South African president Thabo Mbeki and the leaders of some thirty other countries. There were leaders from the business world too, such as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates; John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems; and AOL chief executive Steve Case.

I hosted a breakfast meeting on Sunday, January 30, with some of the leading technology executives present, and also met privately with Bill Gates, whom I invited to visit Jordan. At a session later in the day I spoke about the challenges facing the Middle East, the terrible pressure of unemployment, and how technology could help. Even in the Swiss Alps I couldn't escape neighborhood politics. Ya.s.ser Arafat was there, meeting on the side with President Clinton. And two Iranian exiles were arrested for throwing paint bombs at the Iranian foreign minister. In 2003, Jordan hosted the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, a regional meeting that we have since hosted every other year in the summer. And that year, Rania was invited to join the board of the World Economic Forum Foundation, as the only member from the Arab world.

Davos was a beautiful place in which to carry out the important task of persuading global executives to consider investing in Jordan. But not all my work that first year took place in such elegant settings. A few months after becoming king, I paid a visit to Sudan. It was quite a contrast.

As we were about to touch down at Khartoum airport, I looked down from the plane and could not see any welcoming committee. But out of the corner of one eye I caught a glimpse of an old T-55 tank rumbling toward us with soldiers clinging to its side. I was momentarily alarmed until we landed and saw the welcoming committee and I realized that this was the presidential guard, sent to patrol the area and ensure security. President Omar Al-Bas.h.i.+r invited us to join him in an aged Mercedes saloon car. I sat in the back with the president, the faded leather seat covered by polished wooden beads, and my brother Ali, at the time the head of my personal security detail, sat in the front, next to the driver. As we sped off to the heart of Khartoum, Ali pointed to two bullet holes in the pa.s.senger window and asked the driver what they were from. "Ah, that's from the last a.s.sa.s.sination attempt," he replied. He did not elaborate.

The Sudanese were gracious hosts, and on my return to Jordan I sent them an official gift: a new armored car. A few days later I got a message from the royal protocol staff that the Sudanese had sent a present of their own: a C-130 transport aircraft had landed at Amman's airport with two lion cubs inside. They also had sent a warden, who explained how to care for the animals and then went back to Khartoum.

Valuing the symbolism of the gift but not quite knowing what to do with the animals, I had them put in a tennis court outside my house. When Rania noticed that they had begun to show an interest in our children, Hussein and Iman (who was born in September 1996), then five and two, she put her foot down and insisted that the lions must go. I "regifted" them to a close friend who liked to collect exotic animals.

Back in Amman, I learned that one of my fellow delegates from Davos, John Chambers, had announced that he was so impressed by the potential opportunities in Jordan that Cisco would invest $1 million here in a venture capital fund for high-tech companies. Cisco, a manufacturer of the infrastructure that powers the Internet, subsequently became a key partner, helping us to increase Internet access throughout the country. Chambers has been an outstanding friend to Jordan, donating computer equipment and opening an office in Amman, and has been very vocal in promoting our country, telling other business leaders about the opportunities in Jordan.

But we could not rely only on outsiders to develop our information technology industry. Soon local entrepreneurs started to spring up. In 1994, Randa Ayoubi founded Rubicon, an education software company. Using venture capital investment, she expanded into animation, creating a multimillion-dollar company with offices in Amman, Los Angeles, Dubai, and Manila. Rubicon produced a children's cartoon series, Ben & Izzy, about two boys-one American, one Jordanian-who go on adventures together through history. She signed a deal with MGM to promote the Pink Panther cartoon in the Middle East and received a further multimillion-dollar investment from a Gulf buyout firm.

In 1997, two young Jordanians, Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, started an Arabic-language Web-based e-mail service. Named Maktoob ("it is written" in Arabic), the company became one of the region's largest online Web portals, with over sixteen million users, and attracted millions of dollars in venture capital investment. In August 2009, Maktoob was acquired by the American Internet company Yahoo!. For a high-tech start-up to be bought by a technology giant may be nothing new in Silicon Valley, but this was a first for Jordan, and for the Arab world, and I was immensely proud of the founders for showing that we could compete on a global stage.

One of the benefits of information technology is the impact it can have at all levels of society. From my time as an army officer, I knew how quickly my soldiers could learn to operate a Challenger I tank with its computer-aided firing system. I was tremendously proud of their intelligence and adaptability and knew that they would be successful in any environment, given the right opportunities. A lot of these people had entered the army as enlisted men because that was the only route of advancement open to them. Many had the potential to go to university, but they could not afford the cost.

Many of these talented men left the army when they were young, in their late thirties and early forties, and still had much to contribute. So through the Royal Court we provided scholars.h.i.+ps for all retired servicemen who wanted to learn computer skills. These men were extremely dedicated students, and almost all graduated. Many went on to work as technical experts in schools, training teachers in the latest computer technologies.

We also inst.i.tuted sweeping educational reforms, making it mandatory for computer skills and English to be taught in all schools across the country from the first grade onward and increasing standards in math and science. Our efforts have paid off. Every four years, the International a.s.sociation for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, a nonprofit group dedicated to improving education, conducts an international a.s.sessment of science and math teaching. In 2007, Jordan's eighth graders ranked the highest in the Arab world-in science they came out ahead of Malaysia, Thailand, and Israel.

Our first public university, the University of Jordan, was founded in 1962, and our first private university, Al-Ahliyya Amman University, in 1990. There are now twenty private universities and ten more public universities attended by 243,000 students across the country. A large number of students from both the public and private inst.i.tutions graduate with technical and engineering degrees, providing a skilled pool of employees for foreign companies investing in Jordan, local start-ups, and high-tech businesses across the region. We also began to set up IT skills clinics in remote areas across the country where local people could learn about computers free of charge.

Information technology and education are both key to improving a nation's economy, but to develop further we would have to continue opening up to the world. Joining the WTO was only the first step.

In June 2000, I returned to the United States and met with President Clinton, who congratulated me on our members.h.i.+p in the WTO. Again, he asked what he could do to help Jordan. And again I think he half expected me to ask for an increase in aid. This time I said, "I want a free trade agreement with the United States." Going far beyond the general terms of the WTO, a free trade agreement (FTA) reduces tariffs on trade between two countries to the lowest practical level. FTAs are extremely prized for the access they give to the American market. At that time the United States had FTAs with only three countries: Canada, Mexico, and Israel.

Though somewhat taken aback, President Clinton said he would provide his full support. We began negotiations on June 6, 2000, and the U.S.-Jordan FTA was approved by the U.S. Senate on September 24, 2001. Jordan became the first Arab country to sign an FTA with the United States. Boosted by the reduction in tariffs, total exports from Jordan to the United States rose from $18 million in 1998 to about $1 billion by 2009-outstripping the level of our total exports worldwide when I took office.

Remembering our conversation from the previous year, President Clinton told me that he had met with President a.s.sad of Syria in Geneva a few months earlier, but the meeting had been disappointing. No progress was made and it did not look likely that Syrian-Israeli negotiations would resume.

Domestically, we continued the effort to make Jordan attractive to foreign investors by creating a special economic zone in the southern port of Aqaba in May 2001. The economic zone had zero customs duty and greatly reduced tax rates, and it aimed to attract $6 billion of investment by 2020, an ambitious target. The incentives were more popular than we ever imagined, and by the end of 2008 we had already attracted over $20 billion in foreign investment, including funds from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Lebanon.

The Kuwaitis, and in particular Emir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, have been some of Jordan's strongest supporters, and among the largest investors in our economy. Rania was born in Kuwait, and the emir always refers to her as his daughter. Every time we meet, he treats me like a member of his family. "How is our daughter?" he asks.