Amman is the main transit point for flights in and out of Baghdad. On my way out of Iraq this past weekend, I spent 24 hours in the capital of what many of my colleagues call “the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom.”

 True, Jordan isn’t nearly as flashy or flavorful as Egypt, Dubai or Lebanon, but it’s a safe and comforting whistle stop for travelers emerging from Iraq. This past week, Amman happened to be much more alive than usual.

The Iraqi national soccer team’s victory had drawn thousands of exiled Iraqis to the streets of this typically sedate and orderly city. Iraqi refugees in Amman said Jordanian security forces roughed up and arrested several soccer fans who blocked traffic or who had shot guns into the air in celebration of the Asian Cup win. Some Iraqis complained that the authorities used excessive force in stopping the festivities, and warned that the incident was a harbinger of more troubles between police and the refugee community.

Jordan also played host to a conference on how Iraq’s neighbors can better cope with the influx of displaced Iraqis. Amman and Damascus each have an estimated 1 million Iraqi refugees, and both nations have begun girding their borders and cracking down on their “guests.” The governments of Jordan and Syrian say their health care, education and housing sectors are struggling to cope with the strain of so many new people.

Amnesty International and other advocacy groups have urged the international community to help ease the crisis. The NGOs also apply pressure on the host countries to grant Iraqis the full rights of refugees and asylum-seekers. Save the Children’s Amman office announced one long-anticipated reform: Jordan has agreed to grant all school-age Iraqi children access to its public and private schools for the academic year that begins this month.

A different variety of foreign guest appeared much more welcome in Amman. Because of the trouble brewing in the favored holiday destination of Beirut, many rich Gulf Arabs have turned to Cairo, Damascus and Amman as substitute vacation spots.

Fancy restaurants, upscale boutiques and luxury hotels in Amman are filled with Saudi and Kuwaiti families this summer. Some Gulf men come alone and are notorious for fueling the underground sex industry (a planeload of Tunisian prostitutes disembarked while I was at the airport), while other men arrive with their fully veiled wives and requisite Filipina nannies to watch the kids. At the breakfast buffet of a five-star Amman hotel one morning, six Gulf families dined, each with a Filipina domestic worker looking on from a separate table.

Amman also was abuzz with domestic political wrangling. Jordanians had just voted in municipal elections, including the first-ever mayoral polls. Now, before anyone starts rejoicing over another “Arab spring of democracy,” we should note the hefty restrictions the government placed on candidates from the Islamist Action Front, the local political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The electoral reforms didn’t fully extend to Amman, where only half the municipal council seats were on the ballot. King Abdullah, who appears to be growing increasingly concerned about the IAF’s popularity among Amman’s poor, will continue to appoint the rest of the council and the mayor.

The IAF claims the government committed several violations such as allowing military personnel to vote more than once. I have no idea whether the allegations are true, but I have spent enough time in Jordan to know that the rosy kingdom you see the gorgeous Queen Rania extolling to Oprah is not exactly true-to-life.

Jordan is a soft police state with very little freedom of expression or freedom of the local press. Those who openly criticize the king or the royal family get a one-way ticket to jail. Jordan is a destination for the U.S. practice of extraordinary renditions, the backyard of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and a breeding ground for militants such as its most famous terror export: Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the late leader of al Qaida in Iraq. Jordanian intelligence agents keep close tabs on Islamist and other opposition activists, and crackdowns on dissidents can be swift and brutal.

But it’s easy to see why the West latched onto last week’s polls as some kind of sea change in Jordanian politics. King Abdullah and Queen Rania have always had great success at peddling their authoritarian kingdom as a democratic oasis in the Middle East. The blue-eyed king addressed Congress earlier this year in easy, unaccented English. His stunning wife, Queen Rania, is portrayed as the Princess Diana of the Islamic world.

At home, however, the queen’s self-perpetuated image as a stylish Arab superwoman is wearing thin. She was just heralded as a hero in Glamour magazine, appeared on several international best-dressed lists and penned an unremarkable, Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace essay for the Washington Post web site. Everyday Jordanians, however, know her as a powerful operator whose focus on “Jordan’s children” really means a focus on creating opportunities for her own children, and those of her similarly wealthy friends.

I came across a transcript of Oprah’s show that featured Queen Rania right after the 9/11 attacks. The queen talked in vague terms about “honor killings,” which are still common practice in Jordan. Queen Rania pledged that, “once we have this open dialogue and we reach to the grassroots where people can understand this issue, we are hoping through democratic process to change these laws that we have in Jordan.”

That was in 2001. In a case last month, a Jordanian court sentenced a man to just six months in prison for killing his pregnant sister in a so-called honor case. From what I could find on the Web, there wasn’t a peep of protest from the thoroughly modern, Western-friendly royal couple.

It’s been a hectic week of jarringly upbeat U.S. press conferences, soccer fever, odd run-ins with Iraqi officials, and the usual litany of woes from friends and colleagues in Baghdad.

Party like it's 2003

By now, you know that Iraq won its first Asian Cup soccer championship, which led to massive street celebrations, an uplifting burst of national unity and no small number of casualties from “celebratory gunfire.” A couple of colleagues and I watched the Iraq-Saudi Arabia final in the Green Zone living room of Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

A slew of Iraqi, British and American officials piled onto couches and picked at fruits and pastries as the match was projected onto a large wall. The same politicians who bash one another when we call them separately for comment were kissing hellos and sitting side by side.

The former speaker of parliament, a Sunni, puffed on a thick cigar as he chatted up his archenemies, representatives of the Shiite cleric and militia commander Muqtada al Sadr. Representatives of the Shiite powerhouse formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq rubbed elbows with Sunnis, Kurds and rival Shiites from the Sadrists and Fadhila Party.

The impossibly tall British ambassador hobnobbed with Charles Heatley, the onetime spokesman for the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) who mysteriously has reappeared in Baghdad. In fact, the entire surreal evening smacked of Baghdad circa summer 2003 – many members of the original Iraqi Governing Council, the first U.S.-appointed Iraqi administration, were in attendance.

“Ah, we’ve come full circle,” said one cynical Iraqi cabinet minister, surveying the partygoers. “It just goes to show that the Americans are back to square one: the CPA days.”

Meet the Crockers

Leila Fadel, our fierce Baghdad bureau chief, spent the week polishing up a profile of Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. (Shameless plug: her piece should be out later this week; look for it on www.mcclatchydc.com

All week long, it’s been Crocker this and Crocker that. He once met the mufti of Syria. He speaks fluent Arabic. His office was mortared. Do the Sunnis like him? Do the Shiites? Do the Kurds? Does the appointment of a veteran Arabist come too late to salvage the U.S. mission in Iraq?

After a particularly long day of such ruminations (she was so entrenched in the story that she’d begun to just refer to the ambo as “Ryan”), Leila took a break and invited some journalist friends over for homemade cookies.

The only shop that sells brown sugar is too dangerous to reach nowadays, so Leila, an accomplished chef, improvised and made sugar cookies. We couldn’t find real M&Ms, so the doughy circles were dotted with candy-coated knockoffs called Bonibons.

Even as the guests toasted her culinary skills, it was apparent work was still on Leila’s mind."Betty Crocker and Ryan Crocker,” she mused, “a match made in heaven.”

Or Baghdad.

OKC in the KDP

Homesickness is a funny thing. It creeps up in the oddest of places. It struck this week at the Baghdad headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, where I was scheduled to interview a party official.

Typically, I have to be more Arab than American while reporting in Iraq. Survival in the so-called Red Zone (i.e., anywhere outside the Green Zone) calls for Arabic-only conversations and blending in by donning a scarf and modest clothing.

But perhaps because my entire family is on vacation without me right now or perhaps because the peshmerga guards at the KDP office greeted me with, “Americhi?” (American?) by way of ascertaining my threat level, all I could think about was Oklahoma City.

The minister was a half-hour late for the appointment, so I sat alone in the frosty waiting room of Saddam Hussein’s former protocol office. A dozen or so armed guards milled about and peeked in from time to time. I flipped through notebooks, trying to look professional, when I was really daydreaming about Ulysses S. Grant High School and lazy days at Lake Thunderbird.

I made the mistake of opening my day planner. I had never noticed the map of the United States on the back pages. There it was: Oklahoma, straddled across the planner’s middle fold. Middle America. The heartland. Twisters, football, plains. A flyover state, where the waving wheat/can sure smell sweet/when the wind/comes right behind the rain.

I found myself tracing the Oklahoma panhandle with a ballpoint pen as a lump rose in my throat. The peshmerga thought I was suffering from dehydration and brought in bottles of water.

Sweet defiance

The first car bomb of the day went off at 10:20 a.m. Our hotel windows shook, smoke rose from a nearby square, the usual.

Later, we found out the explosion killed at least 16 people outside Faqma Ice Cream, a popular summertime spot where the workers turn scoops of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream into works of art. They drizzle chocolate syrup over the ice cream and arrange little wafers into intricate designs.

One of our Iraqi staff members missed the bombing by five minutes – only because a curtains vendor she was meeting happened to be late for an appointment. I hear Faqma is in such bad shape that it’ll probably be a while before anyone lines up for milkshakes again.

Today is my last day in Baghdad and the Iraqi friend who narrowly missed the bombing helped me decide on a goodbye treat for the staff. Faqma was no longer an option, so we decided to head over to a fabulous bakery near the Babylon Hotel. I put on a scarf because my sleeves only covered my arms to the elbow. My friend shook her head and said we weren’t going to dress like that today.

She was in short sleeves, no headscarf and a skirt that stopped at mid-calf. I was in a longer skirt, with barely covered arms and bare head. Luckily, our security adviser was on another assignment and didn’t see us leave the hotel in what might as well have been our birthday suits, given the ultraconservative climate of post-liberation Baghdad.

At the bakery, we hurriedly made our selections and paid for the beautiful little triangles of cheesecake, chocolate mousse, apple pie and carrot cake. My friend told the clerk how happy she was that the bakery had not only continued to stay open in the face of nonstop car bombings, but insisted on still selling fruitcakes at Christmas and pastel-colored pastries at Easter.

“Don’t say another word! You’ll jinx us!” the clerk replied, not joking.

On the short ride home, I asked my friend what the hell we thought we were doing – going to a bakery, two hours after a car bombing in the same area, with our hair and arms on full display for the militants who’d congregated at every corner along our route.

“I just get so tired of it. When it was safer, I wore the scarf, and now it’s dangerous and I refuse to wear it,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. I just don’t care what happens to me.”

Quote of the week, No. 1

Sahar, one of our Iraqi correspondents, has been living in the hotel with us because her neighborhood in Baghdad has grown too perilous for her to make the daily trip to and from the office. An example of why she had to move is here, on our Iraqi staff members’ blog.

It’s been a delight to watch Sahar and her two wonderful children lapping up 24-hour generator-provided electricity, wireless Internet, hot showers and room service. But today she showed up in the newsroom glum-faced and announced that a problem with a water main in the hotel had flooded her room and forced the family to move, yet again.

“We are Iraqis,” she said matter-of-factly. “It seems displacement is our fate.”

Quote of the week, No. 2

Earlier this week, I met up with my favorite U.S. military public affairs officer. Actually, he’s a former senior PAO who’s now working on training programs for Iraqi troops.

The officer sipped an iced latte in the Green Zone and reflected on his days as a gatekeeper for journalists covering the U.S. war effort. He said the generals weren’t a bad lot, and that they usually took to heart the gentle reminder he offered when a media blackout was requested: “If you don’t want to talk about it, you probably want to ask yourself why you’re doing it.”