Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has earned a billion-dollar bonus from Uncle Sam for taking on all the region's problems.
On Feb. 3, King Abdullah told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the “gloves are off” after the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) burned one of his pilots alive. That same day, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Jordanian counterpart, Nasser Judeh, signed a three-year agreement to boost military and economic aid to the beleaguered US ally.
Congress has eagerly followed suit.
The pending foreign aid bills in both the House and Senate set aside at least $1 billion for Jordan. The kingdom has benefited from that level of funding — up 50% from a few years ago — since 2014, but the agreement with Kerry makes it formal.
Meanwhile, defense appropriators in the House want to authorize the Pentagon to use up to $600 million of its $2.06 million Counterterrorism Partnership Fund for “supporting and enhancing efforts of the armed forces of Jordan and to sustain security along the border of Jordan with Syria and Iraq.” And the full House has gone one step further by passing legislation to add Jordan to a list of countries that get expedited congressional review under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976.
“It’s time to support,” the bill’s author, House Foreign Affairs MENA panel chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., told Al-Monitor. “Here’s an ally who’s standing up to this evil, this poison that’s going to drag us all downhill if we don’t defeat the enemy.”
For all the attention paid to IS, however, Jordan faces a more existential threat.
Most of the aid — $637 million — in the State Department’s request for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1 is devoted to economic support, including a $129 million cash transfer to the central government. The tiny, resource-poor country is increasingly in debt, partly because it hosts more than 600,000 Syrian refugees.
The situation has only gotten worse after the UN’s World Food Program late last year suspended its food voucher program for the refugees because of what it called a severe cash shortfall.
The Senate foreign aid bill acknowledges the dire situation by making available an extra $100 million in water sector support. And the State Department has responded with $556 million in humanitarian aid to help the Syrian refugees in Jordan since 2012.
Jordan’s ace in the hole is the US-educated king’s close personal ties with US policymakers in Congress and the executive branch forged since he took office in 1999. Jordan, home to some 4.5 million Palestinians — well over half the total population — has also been a key US partner in Middle East peace efforts, particularly since its 1994 peace treaty with Israel.
Israeli-Palestinian talks, however, remain in a deep freeze after their collapse last year. And US plans to train Syrian rebels in Jordan have gotten off to a painfully slow start, prompting Jordan to start weighing the creation of a buffer zone in southern Syria to prevent an IS takeover despite US concerns about getting dragged into the civil war there.
To help boost its influence, Jordan paid Vivien Ravdin Communications $43,600 last year for “communication and editorial consulting.” The kingdom had also worked with the law firm of White & Case until last year in a doomed effort to prevent a billion-dollar civil suit against its biggest bank from going to trial.
The decade-old case against Amman-based Arab Bank has strained relations between the two allies after President Barack Obama declined to go to bat for Jordan. The bank is accused of funneling money to the families of Hamas terrorists responsible for 39 American deaths in Israel.
The bank suffered its latest blow in April when a federal judge in Brooklyn upheld a September 2014 jury verdict that concluded that Arab Bank had knowingly supported terrorism by handling Hamas money. The suit marks the first time a bank has been found liable for terrorism-related offenses in a civil suit.
The verdict comes after Jordan tried and failed to convince the Supreme Court that the bank was merely following local banking privacy laws when it refused to turn over the names of its clients. Instead, a Brooklyn district court judge in 2010 instructed jurors to take the refusal as a tacit admission of guilt.
The July 2013 brief, written by Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general for the Obama administration, warned of “a grave threat” to Jordan’s “stability and prosperity” if the ruling was allowed to stand. It points out that Arab Bank has accounted for 20-33% of Amman’s Stock Exchange market capitalization in recent years and operates some of the only transparent banking branches in the Palestinian territories.
“Given Arab Bank’s prominence, severe reputational and economic harm to Arab Bank also could destabilize the economies of Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the surrounding region,” the brief asserts. “Economic instability could in turn lead to political instability, which would disrupt the mutual efforts of Jordan and the United States to broker peace in the Middle East.”
The issue had split the Obama administration, according to The New York Times, between State Department diplomats eager to protect a key ally and Treasury and Justice department officials who didn’t want banking privacy laws to take precedence over tax-evasion concerns. In the end, the White House asked — successfully — that the high court stay out of the case.
*Al-Monitor
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