Such Good Friends Again

For more than two years, the feud between Egypt's Colonel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein fairly curdled the Middle East's air waves with choice blends of camel drivers' curses, ancestral aspersions and bogeyman bombast. Heckling Hussein as "the little king" and "a British Zionist agent," Nasser's radios warned Hussein and "his gang" that the Jordanians would soon "hang you on poles and watch your rotten bodies swing."

"Nasser fills the earth with plots and corruption," answered King Hussein in a broadcast. "His voice and his radios rave both morning and night like one stricken with fever." Hussein's radio labeled Nasser the "new pharaoh," "Communism's first agent in the Middle East . . . pilgrimaging to his Mecca in Moscow time after time," and Bedouin signs proclaimed, at parades honoring the King: "Hussein is the son of the Prophet, Nasser the son of a postman."

But last week fevers on both sides abated, proving once again that the shifting politics of the Middle East can make the best of bedfellows transients, or the worst of enemies useful, in short order. Concern over Iraq had brought them together: Nasser's fear of an Iraq that challenged his all-Arab pretensions, Hussein's distaste for the Iraqi regime that came to power by killing his King-cousin. In a move calculated to enhance Nasser's claim to be the friend of all Arab nations and to bolster Hussein on his precarious throne, the colonel and the King made up, agreed to try to be friends as they once were (see cut), arranged to exchange ambassadors again next month.

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