At the now forgotten Palestinian “road map” summit after the fall of Saddam, Colin Powell is said to have taken King Abdullah of Jordan aside and assured him in a Rumsfeldian echo that the Administration saw him as part of the “new Middle East” rather than the old Middle East. It’s hard to see why on the basis of his performance before a joint session of Congress, aptly characterized in today’s New York Sun as “balderdash”:

“The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration far beyond, is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine,” the king said. “This is the core issue. And this core issue is not only producing severe consequences for our region, it is producing severe consequences for our world.”

That’s not true, and, even if it were, it would be a psychosis so irrational as to defy sane resolution. And, even if one is inclined to defer to this all-purpose boilerplate from Saudis, Egyptians and other Arab “allies”, the Jordanians are least entitled to deploy it. His Majesty well knows the character of Palestinian “justice and peace”. Palestinian “nationalists” assassinated his great-grandfather, and attempted a coup against his father, and in retaliation for the latter in the space of a few weeks King Hussein slaughtered Palestinians on a scale that the poor old Zionazi apartheid butchers could never contemplate in their wildest dreams. During the 20 years the West Bank was part of Jordan, King Abdullah’s father made no effort to address “dispossession” by making it a Palestinian state – and why would he? Jordan was already a majority Palestinian state.

Abdullah’s lazy speech to Congress reminds us that, if Palestine is really “producing severe consequences for our world”, in part it’s because of the high price of the Hashemite monarchy. In 1922, the British installed in Amman a spare prince they didn’t have a gig for mainly as a colonial cost-saving measure. If the Hashemites hadn’t been imported as figureheads, chances are that today a “Palestinian” would be president in the eastern half of Mandatory Palestine. And King Hussein’s weakness before the Arab League 35 years ago created the trap in which Israel is caught: If the “occupied territories” are indeed occupied, why not merely return them to the fellows you occupied them from – ie, Jordan? Instead, in a uniquely perverse global consensus, Israel was instructed it could not return territory captured in war to the defeated party but only to officially designated terrorist successors.

So much for the Hashemites, the much vaunted Arab “moderates”. Other than the fabulously hot westernized wives their kings pick, it’s hard to see what Hashemite moderation boils down to in practical terms.

Powell was wrong. Before Congress this week, His Majesty was the oldest of “old Middle East”.