Crisis, which loves a vacuum, hovered last week over the kingdom of Jordan, a desolate desert nation of 1,500,000 Bedouins and Palestine refugees, broke and adrift now that its imperial British creators have left. Last week, seeing his country beset from within and without, Jordan's young (21) King Hussein bravely grabbed power for himself to save his crumbling country from crackup.
Chaos confronted him. His rabble-rousing Arab Nationalist Premier Suleiman Nabulsi had been openly negotiating federation with Syriawhich would mean the end of Jordan's independence. The Saudis in the south and the...