"... Under the regime of King Abdullah II, this country of six million people has developed itself as something of a "Green Zone" in a tumultuous region - it is strategically located at the heart of the Middle East and bordered by Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the West Bank.
As General Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau in the US, said during a joint training mission and tour of Jordan late last month, the country has become "the lynchpin" in the efforts to create a "peaceful (read: Holds No grudges against Israel!) central command region".
JIPTC is staffed mostly by Jordanians, but the trainers are military and police officers from more than a dozen countries - primarily Canada, the United Kingdom and the US - as well as private contractors, such as DynCorp.......
Since graduating its first class in November 2003, JIPTC has trained more than 50,000 police officers bound for Iraq. The academy has trained four battalions of the Palestinian security forces, deployed under the auspices of US security coordinator, General Keith Dayton, to back the "caretaker" Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad in the West Bank.
With little fanfare, JIPTC has Jordan's regime playing a frontline role in the US project to transform the Middle East.
"Jordan continues to be a key partner and to play a positive role in the region," General David Petraeus, the US commander responsible for the region, told a Senate Armed Service Committee meeting in April.
"Jordan participates in many regional security initiatives and has placed itself at the forefront of police and military training for regional security forces."
Mouin Rabbani, an Amman-based analyst, told Inter Press Service that such a link was also problematic. "Jordan is one of the leading US allies in the region, and it suffers the consequences of US policy, perhaps more than others, because it's situated literally between the two biggest American failures in the region: Iraq and Palestine."
Petraeus has explicitly linked JITPC to attempts to legitimize the failed peace process in the Israel-Palestine conflict. "These efforts will likely prove critical in the continued development of legitimate security forces in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories and, as a consequence, in the long-term viability of the peace process," he told the senate committee.
According to Rabbani, Jordan's support for US efforts in the failed peace process "raises questions about a strategy which is, for all intents and purposes, wholly and exclusively aligned with one external would-be mediator that's seen increasingly as irretrievably hostile to Palestinian and more general Arab national aspirations, and completely wedded to Israeli interests".....
Dayton, in his only major policy speech to date, told the stridently pro-Israel think-tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), that JIPTC-trained Palestinian security forces had engaged in a series of violent raids that were "surprisingly well coordinated" with Israel. Dayton characterized the results as "electric"....... Dayton told the WINEP audience: "You might ask, why Jordan? The answer is pretty simple. The Palestinians wanted to train in the region, but they wanted to be away from clan, family and political influences. The Israelis trust the Jordanians, and the Jordanians were anxious to help."
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