Given that I recently posted an entry,
Jordan’s Civil Society Crackdown, which was somewhat critical of Jordan, I thought that it would be appropriate to link to a
transcript of an interview with Jordan’s King Abdullah from Middle East Quarterly, posted on Regime Change Iran, since it shows his strategic insight. He talks about a variety of subjects in the interview, including how to combat militant Islam, and I can assure you that Abdullah is not one of those Arab leaders who says one thing in English and another in Arabic. He also discusses at length the threat that Iran poses to the Arab world, emphasizing the centrality of Iraq in this regard.

This is an excerpt from the interview that I thought was most revealing (see also my most recent post on Iran, Iran’s Heavy Water Plant):

You have to deal with Iran with a united front. When we went to Iran about a year and a half ago, the Iranians were under tremendous pressure. They felt that they had gotten themselves into a very tight corner, and that????????s why they said, ???????Please, we want to reach out to the United States; we have our Al-Qaeda prisoners that we want to hand over; we want to talk about weapons of mass destruction; and we want to have some sort of a common understanding on the issue of Iraq, the unity of Iraq.??????? But the minute the Europeans had prime ministers knocking on Iran????????s door, the Iranians felt the pressure was off. How do you address the nuclear issue now, given the way Europe is, with France????????s and Germany????????s relationship with the United States? How do you get a united front to deal with Iran? You need a unified front. But even so, that doesn????????t mean we should be letting the Iranians off the hook with what they????????re trying to do in Iraq.

Read the whole interview.

For those not familiar with the background, when Abdullah refers to “Al-Qaeda prisoners” he is talking about the fact that Iran is now giving refuge to a number of Al-Qaeda members, including a few key leaders who have so far eluded capture. They are largely Arabs, and Arab governments such as Jordan and Egypt have been trying to get a hold of them for some time so they can interrogate them and make sure they are put away. There is no reason at all to believe that they are genuinely being held prisoner in Iran, but that does not mean that Iran would not be willing to hand them over if given the proper incentive.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell at Window on the Arab World, and More!