- Vernii
- Dec 7, 2006
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Pretty sure the deal is that the king is a pretty cool bro but his country is filled with the same knuckle-dragging barbarians found elsewhere in the region
Yea basically. King Abdullah is in the weird position of being more liberal than the country he rules. Seems like a pretty chill guy for the most part, and for an Arab leader, pretty likeable:
quote:
Then the business of the afternoon was conducted. The 30 or so men (and one woman, a daughter of one of the tribal leaders) sat on couches against the walls. Tea was served. The king made a short plea for economic reform and for expanding political participation, and then the floor was opened. Leader after leader—many of whom were extremely old, many of whom merely had the appearance of being old—made small-bore requests and complaints. One of the men proposed an idea for the king’s consideration: “In the old days, we had night watchmen in the towns. They would be given sticks. The government should bring this back. It would be for security, and it would create more jobs for the young men.”
I was seated directly across the room from the king, and I caught his attention for a moment; he gave me a brief, wide-eyed look. He was interested in high-tech innovation, and in girls’ education, and in trimming the overstuffed government payroll. A jobs plan focused on men with sticks was not his idea of effective economic reform.
As we were leaving Karak a little while later, I asked him about the men-with-sticks idea. “There’s a lot of work to do,” he said, with fatigue in his voice.
...
Two months after the Arab Spring erupted, the king received the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jordanian branch in his office. “They were the first people I saw in the Arab Spring,” he told me. “They were the loudest voice, so I brought them in, and they said, ‘Our loyalty is to the Hashemites, and we stood with you in the ’40s and ’50s and ’70s,’ and I said, ‘That is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard.’ And they were like, ‘Aaaargh’—they were shocked.” He recounted that he said to them, “ ‘My father told me that you guys watched the way things were going, and when you saw that my father was winning, you went with him.’ I said, ‘This is complete and utter bullshit, and if we’re going to sit here and bullshit each other, then we might as well have a cup of tea and then say goodbye. If you want to have a serious conversation’—we Arabs like to rear end-kiss each other for the first half hour of conversation—‘if you want to have a serious conversation, here’s where we start.’ ”
...
...many summers he and a small group of friends (and a detachment of bodyguards) take an unpublicized motorcycle trip along some remote stretch of American highway. Last summer, he and his friends tracked the trans-Alaska pipeline as it winds its way south from Prudhoe Bay. No one at highway truck stops recognized him, of course, which made him happy. When David Petraeus, who was then the director of the CIA, visited him this past fall, King Abdullah mentioned the Alaska trip in order to have some fun at the expense of the American national-security apparatus. “I said, ‘I don’t know who’s the head of Homeland Security, but I have some real concerns for you. There was a whole bunch of AY-rabs’ ”—he stressed the first syllable in the stereotypically redneck way—“ ‘running around your pipeline, and no one stopped us. Nobody asked us any questions at all. Who’s protecting your border?’ ”
Just don't try and topple him because the HQ of the country's intelligence service is nicknamed "The Fingernail Factory" by Western agencies.
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Mar 28, 2014 02:36
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