Iraqi feeling led Jordan's regime to ask itself: was it possible notto support Saddam? Now, despite dealigning from Iraq in the mid-1990s, Jordan may still be the closest friend Saddam Hussein's regime is likely to find in the region. he Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 triggered the most comprehensive regional realignment since the Sadat peace initiative of 1977. Most Arab states, including Egypt, Syria and all the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), opposed Iraq and joined the US-led coalition. But noticeably absent from that coalition was the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which stood firm as one of the few states not to realign. The Jordanians remained out of the war, urging a peaceful solution. To the displeasure of the United States and its allies, Jordan remained Iraq's closest ally, and the kingdom paid a heavy economic price for its decision. Ten years later, the strange alliance between the conservative Jordanian mon-archy and the" revolutionary" Ba'thist regime-whose forebears had overthrown another Hashemite monarch in 1958-has undergone intriguing transformations. What explains Jordan's unwillingness to join the Desert Storm coalition? And only six years after King Hussein's treaty with Israel, what accounts for the current thaw in Iraqi-Jordanian relations?