Center of the Storm

Out of the Mediterranean sky dropped the transports, bringing 1,200 crack British paratroopers in battle readiness. They landed in Cyprus, not to reinforce that strife-torn island, but to be only a hop, skip and a jump away from Jordan, the Middle East's newest trouble spot.

Jordan is just a wide spot in the desert, with little claim to nationhood. But in one of those swift shifts of international politics, this vacuum in the sand has become the center of the storm, buffeted about by all the angry winds now loose in the Middle East. On one side press the claims of Iraq, its fellow Hashemite nation, and of Britain, its protector and sponsor, asking Jordan to side with the West. On the other side press Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, out to frustrate the West, arousing passions by inflammatory broadcasts, buying agitators, and receiving a helping hand from Moscow, which looks on and cheers.

Black-Tent Kingdom. Winston Churchill, Britain's Colonial Secretary after World War I, created Jordan. He whacked an elbow-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire and handed it to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said, for the Emir's fighting services to Britain in the desert campaigns against the Turks. Abdullah ruled his arid waste spaces as a Bedouin black-tent state, with three courtiers alternating as Premier at the royal pleasure, and a British proconsul in the Lawrence-of-Arabia tradition commanding the British-equipped Arab Legion. Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb Pasha--known affectionately by his Bedouin warriors as Abu Huneik (Father of the Little Jaw), in honor of a bullet wound incurred in World War I fighting--quoted the Arab classics, read the lesson Sundays at the Anglican chapel in Amman, and used Britain's $24 million-a-year subsidy to make his 20,000 legionnaires the Middle East's finest fighting force.

The Arab-Israel war transformed this Biblical land of Edom and Moab, nearly tripling its population (now 1,500,000), adding to its territory a remnant of Arab Palestine west of the Jordan River, and swelling the capital of Amman from a scraggly town of 35,000 into a lusty, horn-tooting city of 200,000. A sophisticated and embittered lot, the West Bankers captured most of the country's commerce, filled half the 40 seats in Parliament, and poured out vituperation toward the West --at Israel, and at the U.S., which in their eyes gave their birthright to the Jews.

The West Bankers want no part of the Western-sponsored Baghdad pact. Only a few are Communists, but all are discontented. In caves and U.N. refugee camps squat 450,000 dispossessed Palestine refugees, idle and restless, spoiling for trouble. With the encouragement of Egyptian agitators and Saudi Arabian bribes, they have challenged the whole basis of Britain's position in its last stronghold on the strategic Middle East land bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa.

Voting with Stones. Jordan's smiling young Harrow-educated Hashemite King, the 20-year-old Hussein, needed help. Faced with overwhelming opposition to the King's attempt to join the anti-Communist Baghdad pact, the palace politicians tried to call off the spring balloting which the King had hastily promised in the midst of last month's rioting.

Demonstrations, too coordinated to be spontaneous, began outside Jerusalem's mosques, spread all over the country. In the city sacred to three religions, mobs pushed through the Damascus Gate, singing and shouting slogans against the Baghdad pact and for immediate elections. Once again Palestinian refugees were in the mob's forefront. Gangs attacked the U.S. consulate, and for the second time in a month tore down the Stars and Stripes and trampled it in the street: Marine guards and Vice Consul Slator Blackiston drove the hooligans away with tear gas and pistols.

In Amman a crowd of 1,000 stoned and burned the U.S. Point Four office. Twice they stormed the Philadelphia Hotel, where several U.S. families had taken refuge, but they were driven back from the lobby. They also fired a British bank and--apparently because it had been built with U.S. Point Four funds--the government's new Department of Health Building. At Ajlun, 30 miles to the north, the hero was Baptist Missionary Lloyd Lovegren of Birmingham, Ala., who talked a mob that had already burned two mission buildings out of putting his hospital to the match. The doctor's father, Dr. Levi Lovegren, who was released last fall from four years' imprisonment in Communist China, was one of the inmates whose life he saved.

By week's end the Legion regained control. They rounded up groups of rioters who had built roadblocks and had scattered rocks on the highways, and made them clear the roads. "We not only make them pick up rocks," said a British brigadier, "but make them carry the rocks half a mile. It works wonders." Heavy government censorship was lifted, and King Hussein thanked the Legion in a broadcast for restoring order, adding: "During the crisis we have identified faces and intentions which do not have the good of the country at heart." First reports said 18 had been killed, 100 wounded. One of those killed was Lieut. Colonel Patrick Lloyd, one of the Arab Legion's 60 British officers.

Deteriorating Strength. Though experience with such street parliamentarians as Mossadegh had taught the world that mob strength in the Middle East can be exaggerated, the latest events in Jordan were treated more gravely in the West than the December risings. The British shelved their strategy of pushing for Arab allegiance to the Baghdad pact. London rushed its paratroopers to Cyprus partly out of the suspicion that the West Bank dissidents had penetrated the Arab Legion to a point where this strong force, once the key to Jordan's stability, might cease to be a reliable instrument of British policy.

Pushed out of Egypt, set back in Jordan, endangered in Cyprus, the British saw their position in the Middle East deteriorating fast.

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