Update on June 18th: Most likely we have been fooled with this fabricated news. Check
Two news items have struck me this morning as they include dangerous signs and strange antagonism. According to Ammon news Republican candidate John McCain will consider Jordan to be THE Palestinian state, bringing back into life the Jordanian option that we Jordanians always like to believe it was dead. McCain's trusted neo-con political advisor Robert Kagan has stated in a lecture in New York that the natural state for the Palestinians will be Jordan, and that the Hashemite Monarchy can be sustained if the Palestinians want that!
This is really shocking as I recall that McCain visited Jordan and met with King Abdullah II two months ago. Such a meeting should have worked in building a good base for the Jordan-McCain relation which would make him, and ultimately his advisors stick to the two state solution strategically promoted by Jordan and even the current US administratioin, albeit in rhetoric.
This statement does not mean a deterministic fate. Even if McCain wins the strategic relations between Jordan and the USA may be able to defuse this threat but this represents a glimpse of the ultra neo-conservative agenda carried by the new Republican candidiate, in contrary to claims that noe-cons are losing ground in the States.
Related to this I was amazed to learn that according to the annual Pew Global Attitudes Survey Jordan is the ONLY country surveyed, apart from the USA that prefers John Mccain to Barrack Obama. The interviews for this survey were done face-to-face and before Obama's unfortunate statement about Jerusalim as a unified capital of Israel. Obama got a 22% favourite rate compared to McCain's 23%. This result is really hard to understand but it may reflect an overall disappointment of USA's policies in the region. It is also noteworthy that Jordan comes only after Turkey and Pakistan in its low level of favorable attitudes to the USA. The three countries are among the USA's main political allies.
The PEW survey has a lot of interesting figures and trends which I will blog about later.
from Canada
McCain should take a look at the refugee camps in jordan before coming out with this conclusion. He doesn't need to fly to jordan to see them; he can see how crowded and bad they are through google earth. Most paletenians in Jordan still live in what is called refugee camps. Someone needs to remind him or enlighten him with that.