His Majesty's Armed Forces――Reassessment of Hashemite
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Draft Paper: DO NOT quote, copy and reproduce content in this paper without the author’s permission. GSCIS Singapore 2015 (Panel: SD01) His Majesty’s Armed Forces――Reassessment of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s Military Capabilities before/after the Arab Spring1 Takuro Kikkawa (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) Introduction: Is Jordan a weak state? Mashriq2 since the Arab Spring breakout has been in a vicious circle of violence caused by both state and private actors in the region. Many Arab states, even regional hegemonies reluctantly admit that they are incomplete to deter serious challenges from non-state militia groups. For example, both Syria (once considered itself the vanguard of Arab Nationalism) and Iraq (in the middle of arms buildup with support of the US Armed Forces) are trapped in the endless fighting against the al-Qaida dropout militia which is known as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This phenomenon clearly shows that we have to reconsider the problem of “weak-state security dilemma” as the core argument among all Middle Eastern conflicts today.3 This paper tries to explore what are the meanings of national security and military strength in an unstable security situation in Mashriq today focusing on the case of Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, an Arab monarchy which has been under the rule of the Hashemite monarchs. Firstly, I try to introduce both the arguments on the Jordanian security and the history of the Jordanian national military very briefly.4 Secondly, I investigate the Jordanian security 1 The author is an associate professor in the College of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU). I would like to thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid (KAKENHI: 21730132) for its financial support. I wish to acknowledge Kota Suechika, Satoru Nakamura, Shingo Hamanaka and Akifumi Ikeda for valuable comments on draft. Words and names common in English language take the familiar form (e.g. “Jordan” and not “Urdunn”) and when an individual has a preferred spelling of his / her name in English (e.g. “Hani Hourani” and not “Hānī Ḥurānī”). 2 In the broad sense, Mashriq means a region that covers the eastern part of the Arab World (Nagasawa [2002]. This article regards Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Occupied Palestine, Iraq and Egypt as Mashriq. 3 Barry Buzan defines weak states are those with (1) high levels of political violence, (2) a conspicuous role for political police in the everyday life of citizens, (3) major political conflict over what ideology will be used to organize the state, (4) lack of coherent national identity, or the presence of contending national identities within the state, (5) lack of a clear and observed hierarchy of political authority, and (6) a high degree of state control over the media (Buzan [1991: 100]). 4 As for reference on the history of Jordanian Armed Forces, we should list the works written by a retired Jordanian Army officer Abu Nuwar and El- Edroos, former Pakistani military advisor to Jordan (Abu Nuwar [2005], El-Edroos [1980]). Especially El-Edroos (1980) is still a groundbreaking publication that comprehensively analyzed the history of politico-military affairs in Jordan and pointed to the Hashemite Kings’ special role as “soldier king” who concurrently being both political and military leaders (El-Edroos [1980: 562-563]). Though Hupp (2014) is a book on the US foreign policy on Jordan, it is a really reliable reference to understand the Jordanian security policies between the 1950s – the 1970s, vividly delineating the process of US-Jordanian security cooperation buildups as which inevitable reaction against the pressure by war-prone neighbors. Anderson (2005) is also an 1 Draft Paper: DO NOT quote, copy and reproduce content in this paper without the author’s permission. today. Here I analyze the process that the Jordanian armed forces transform itself into post-modern military organization then draw a rough sketch on the new Jordanian security policy following the Arab Springs breakout. Ⅰ. Jordanian Security Studies Theoretically, Jordan is a typical weak state. 5 On development, Jordan has always been under the economic- demographic pressures as it lacked enough economic power, scarce of natural resources and water to feed its 6.5 million nations. 6 On diplomacy and security, its geopolitical location surrounded by war-prone regional actors such as Israel, Egypt and Syria has often driven Jordan seeking its protection by external powers – once UK then USA. Such external pressures also come from inside of Jordan. The issues of the over two-million Palestinian refugees in Jordan and the uncounted former-Palestinian Jordanians are still the catalyst to make the Jordanian government sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and to force it to take tough measure against democratization movements to keep subtle balance of power between the old comers and the Palestinian Jordanians. Thus some critics referred to the concept of buffer state to explain the polity of Jordan, which is always in predicament in the anarchic nature of Mashriq seeks neutral or good-neighbor policy toward its war-prone neighbors for state survival. According to former Jordanian diplomat Marwan Muashir, the success of the bilateral peace agreement between Jordan and Israel in 1994 broke the curse of buffer state on some level, making Jordan act more independently (Muasher [2008: 13-32]). Laurie Brand also argued that Jordan’s weak economic structure had driven the state toward dependency on foreign aids (Brand [1994]). To sum up, Jordan’s decades-long structured vulnerability both in domestic and regional societies made a significant contribution to construct the image of passive and client buffer state. Nevertheless, those arguments seem inadequate to analyze the present-day Jordanian security and its military capabilities. Firstly, even if Jordan is still a buffer state, preceding Middle Eastern Studies have not yet analyzed the historical processes how Jordan acquired its resilience against security threats, as they lack perspectives of international political history.7 Secondly, those arguments are based on the premise of subtle balance of power between Arabs and Israel and the many state actors including Arab authoritarian regimes are in stable condition. However in recent years, most Middle Eastern states except a few GCC states they are all under the security threat from non-state actors, namely domestic insurgency, global terrorism and demographic threat caused by the wave of refugees from some failed Arab states (Kamrava [2013: 290-298]). Be that as it may, we still have a question – what makes Jordanian security still stable in the region-wide turmoil following the breakout of the Arab Spring? Benjamin Miller’s works on Middle East war propensity still raise a big question, what are the key factors to maintain the regional order – the state to state balance of power, or the state to insightful work that draws the complicated power distribution among the King, Prime Minister, armed forces and police in the late 1950s. 5 Contrary to its fragile state foundations, however, the Jordanian government has shown its strength to overcome the early phase of democratization movements, by bringing some major strong social forces namely labor unions to the negotiation table. See Kikkawa (2014). 6 See, for example World Bank website (http://data.worldbank.org/country/jordan). Accessed on October 20, 2014. 7 See, for example, Ashton (2008) and Shlaim (2007). 2 Draft Paper: DO NOT quote, copy and reproduce content in this paper without the author’s permission. nation balance? For Miller, the latter “the high level of state-to-nation imbalance” should be the main and deep cause of the Middle East’s high war proneness (Miller [2006, 2007]). He points out the state-to-nation imbalance in the Middle Eastern states “is not quantifiable only in terms of the number of states and the number of ethnic groups. (snip) because of the source of imbalance there is not only the incongruence, which is as high there as in many other Third World regions, but particularly the external incongruence and the trans-border spread of ethno-national groups, which are higher there than in other regions (Miller [2006: 667]).” Therefore, any Middle Eastern states that unconquered their incongruences may be faced with a big dilemma being labeled as “illegitimate state” by both internal and external challengers namely irredentist-revisionist states (e.g. Greater Syria or Greater Israel), regional- transnational movements (e.g. Arab Nationalism, Islamism) and secessionisms (Ibid). For this argument, again Jordan should be a typical weak state as it has been suffered from the threats of irredentist-revisionist states (Nasser’s Egypt, Israel in 1967, Syria in 1970) and the Palestinian secessionists. Jordan does not have resource wealth like GCC states that enables to win domestic-rent seekers over to state’s side. Needless to say, national unity through democratization is an ideal option to conquer state-nation incongruence. However, the Hashemite monarchy still has some big obstacles to relax the laws on political liberty like Morocco, perhaps the sole Arab monarchy that has already launched a comprehensive and drastic political reforms. As Kamrava noted, “compounding the economic difficulties of relatively small rent revenues are the lack of a historically resonant tradition of monarchy, especially in Jordan, and the problems of crafting a popular lore of monarchical legitimacy based on local tradition and heritage (Kamrava [2013: 230]).” Despite the high risk for domestic instability following the Arab Spring, the Jordanian Army has leeway to deploy its troops for international cooperation, namely sending its medical team to Japan after the Earthquake in 2011 and joining the U.S. led joint strikes against ISIS since September 2014.8 Obviously, making a state and its nation as congruent is a fundamental for all nation states.