SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Because Iran is throwing missiles at Jordan right now, you need to know something first. Jordan did not grow out of the ground like an old country. It was stitched together in a hotel in Cairo in March 1921 by a handful of British officials who needed a cheap solution and a quiet map.

https://x.com/Shinamuller/status/2094896641904161096

Because Iran is throwing missiles at Jordan right now, you need to know something first. Jordan did not grow out of the ground like an old country. It was stitched together in a hotel in Cairo in March 1921 by a handful of British officials who needed a cheap solution and a quiet map.
The Ottoman Empire had just collapsed. Britain was sitting on Mesopotamia, Palestine, and a big empty stretch of desert east of the Jordan River. Keeping troops there cost a fortune. Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, called a meeting at the Semiramis Hotel. They joked they were the forty thieves. Gertrude Bell was the only woman in the room who actually knew the tribes and the roads. T. E. Lawrence was there. Sir Percy Cox came from Baghdad with the files.
They needed Arab kings who would take British money and not demand a giant army. Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, got Iraq. His older brother Abdullah needed a prize too, otherwise the family would sulk. So they gave him the leftover desert and called it Transjordan. Churchill later said he created the place on a Sunday afternoon with a stroke of a pen. That is not poetry. That is how the country entered the world.
Abdullah became emir, then king. The British paid him, trained his force, and used the land as a buffer. After independence the Hashemite throne stayed. Decades later American aircraft and missile batteries moved onto Jordanian air bases because the same strip of desert sits in a useful place between Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the Gulf. King Hussein Air Base. Al Azraq. Muwaffaq Salti. Names on a modern war map that sit on ground first outlined in that Cairo dining room.
So when Iranian missiles fly toward those bases, they are not hitting some ancient kingdom that chose this fight in the year 700. They are hitting a state invented to save British cash and keep two Hashemite brothers employed. The joke is old and it is not funny anymore. A hotel table made the border. The border hosted the bases. The bases drew the missiles. That is the whole chain.
Read it once more if you have to. Cairo, March 1921. Cheap kings. A Sunday map. A country that still has to catch steel that was aimed at someone else’s war.