Leaving by Rope & Road

Jordan's all-night curfew was lifted last week for a macabre purpose--to permit citizens to witness and draw the moral from the hanging of three Jordanian National Guardsmen and a street vendor.

For 3 1/2 hours the broken body of Mohammed Said Kanibi, clad in copper-red execution clothes and draped with a huge sign proclaiming the man a spy for Israel, dangled from a scaffold in front of Amman's old Roman amphitheater (which survives from the days when Amman's name was Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love). In the public squares of Nablus, Tulkarm and Hebron--cities of that ancient land of Canaan whose milk and honey Moses' twelve spies once surveyed for the children of Israel--three other Guardsmen were hanged at the same hour. All had been convicted as spies last December, accused of having been caught crossing the border with maps and reports of Jordan troop dispositions. Their public execution last week was meant to show 21-year-old King Hussein as the ruthless foe of those who serve hated Israel. It was also a warning to all agents of "outside influences."

The same day, Hussein achieved another victory against "outside influences." The first of some 4,000 Syrian troops, installed in Jordan since last November on a pretext of "protecting Jordan from Israeli attack," began pulling out of Mafrak and Irbid. The Syrian soldiers, usually seen strolling in the public squares unshaven, holding hands and eating ice cream, are not highly esteemed as fighting men. They are sloppy and undisciplined, and their presence had always been much more of a threat to Jordan than to Israel. The troops' departure was speeded by Hussein's influential new ally, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, who persuaded both Syria and Egypt that it would be better for the Syrians to go.

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