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Hollow-Eyed Misery. And yet Jordan has been crippled by the war. The swarm of refugees crossing the Allenby Bridge from the Israel-occupied west bank has been reduced to a trickle, and the Israelis last week reversed their position and announced that refugees would be allowed to return to their homes.
But in Amman, all schoolrooms and mosques have been converted into refugee centers, their furniture stacked in corners, their floors covered with straw mats and the mats in turn covered by ragged, hollow-eyed, miserable people. Ten new tent camps have been opened near Amman, but they are hardly more livable. Hot desert winds whip up sandstorms in the summer afternoons, choking the air and knocking down tents. Camp authorities fear that when winter arrives, at least half of their charges will freeze to death in the cold desert nights.
In the past, Hussein has been the only Arab leader to encourage Palestinian refugees to come out of their camps, get themselves jobs, and take part in the life of the land. But there are no longer any jobs left. Unemployment already stood at 14% before the war, has now hit 25%. Last year, the west bank of the Jordan brought in well over half of the nation's foreign-currency earnings. Without it, Jordan stands to lose most of its tourist earnings of $35 million a year.
The war wrecked Jordan's tough little Arab Legion, left its air force literally without planes. Three-quarters of Jordan's tanks were lost in the fighting, most of them knocked out by Israeli jets. Official casualty figures list more than 6,000 soldiers killed or missing—but there is evidence that perhaps 5,000 of them are hiding out on the west bank, waiting for a chance to steal across the river and return to Amman. Despite his pleas for military aid from the West, Hussein says that he has got no specific commitments from either the U.S. or Britain. Hussein is far from happy with the way the war was fought. "There was not enough coordination, not enough planning, not enough anything," he says. But he is determined to rebuild his forces, with aid or without, as fast as possible.
Throughout the Arab world, the war swirled over armies, economies and political reputations with varying degrees of destruction. Items:
¶ EGYPT lost at least three-quarters of its air force, 750 of its 1,000 tanks and enormous quantities of lighter vehicles, weapons and ammunition. A massive Russian airlift—up to 75 Antonov-12 transports a day land at the Cairo airport—has already replaced some of the losses, bringing in an estimated 150 crated jets and a variety of halftracks and trucks. Even if the airlift were main tained at its present rate, it would take at least a year to replace all the equipment that was destroyed or abandoned in the war—and the Russians do not seem anxious to replace the entire $1 billion in lost equipment, preferring to give Egypt a defensive position without making it capable of launching an attack on Israel.