MIDDLE EAST: The Three Vultures

The Suez crisis disappeared from the headlines without having been solved. Its ill effects, however, which would reverberate for months to come, sounded most loudly last week not in Egypt itself but in Jordan, the most vulnerable vacuum in the Middle East. It was election time in the hatchet-shaped Hashemite kingdom of Jordan at a most unpropitious moment.

In the old city of Jerusalem white cloth banners covered with sprawling Arabic letters hung over every street, flapping incongruously against ancient masonry. From improvised platforms in the coffeehouses of Amman and a dozen other towns, impassioned speakers harangued attentive crowds.

Picking the Bones. Jordan has been racked by political instability ever since her anti-Baghdad Pact riots of 1955 and the expulsion of Britain's famed Soldier Glubb Pasha last March. "Jordan," said one Western observer not long ago, "is dying, and there are three vultures waiting to pick her bones." Hovering closest of all was Israel, which four times in the last month has sent regular army units smashing into Jordan on bloody "retaliatory raids" whose only logical purpose seemed to be to hasten Jordan's disintegration.

Fearful that Israel was contemplating all-out attack and dismayed by the evident inferiority of his army, Jordan's 20year-old King Hussein turned for aid to the second of the three vultures-Iraq. Iraq, which has long dreamed of extending her borders, was willing to send troops into Jordan as long as they did not have to serve under the King's inexperienced young general, Abu Nuwar. Britain too would rather see Jordan dominated by Iraq, Britain's strongest remaining Middle Eastern ally, than by the third vulture-Nasser's Egypt.

Israel, however, had no intention of allowing Jordan to fall into Iraqi hands. If Iraqi troops enter Jordan, warned Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion pointedly, "Israel will reserve freedom of action." In the inflamed and credulous Middle East there were many who thought war was about to break out.

At this point, Britain's charge d'affaires (wearing striped pants and cutaway to emphasize the gravity of the occasion) sternly informed Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir that "any act of hostility against Jordan by Israel will automatically bring the Anglo-Jordan Treaty into play." To show that Britain meant business, the R.A.F. last week moved four of its fast new Hawker jets to Amman.

Israel's warning had its effect, however. The Jordanian government announced that "for the time being" Iraqi troops would not come in.

A Deaf Ear. Though the threat of war had temporarily diminished, his British allies continued to do their best to convince King Hussein that this was no time for Jordan to be holding elections. Hussein, whose overriding objective is to maintain his popularity with his mercurial subjects, turned a deaf ear to these appeals. Said he: "The elections will be held," and at week's end they were, in an atmosphere of surprising calmness.