Winds of War Blow Ill for Jordanian Port City : Sanctions: Aqaba had thrived for the past decade. Now, tourism is dead, retail business is drying up and shipping activity is moribund.

The 132-room Alcazar Hotel in Aqaba has 132 vacancies this weekend, leaving owner William Sawalha ample time by the pool to consider his future. He is studying prospectuses of small hotels for sale along the California coast.

“It took us 10 years to build up a business,” Sawalha said the other day. “This was to have been our big year for European tourists. Now, . . .”

Sawalha, 54, a Jordanian graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said there has been no commercial traffic at all, and every single advance booking for the October-April tourist season has been canceled.

A hotelier’s pain is Jordan’s pain is Aqaba’s pain. A modern, growing port city of 45,000 that for a decade profited from Middle Eastern wars is now prostrate at the prospect of another war in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Tourism is dead on the tense Gulf of Aqaba, retail business is drying up, and port activity is moribund.

Many people blame it all on the United States.

“The United States and other countries supporting the sanctions against Iraq have just about stopped this city; we are almost at a standstill,” complained Bassam E. Kakish, a retired three-star general who is the government-appointed president of the Aqaba Regional Authority.

No pleasure boats were sailing out of the Royal Yacht Club. No European visitors were swimming with scuba equipment among the coral off the Royal Dive Center. At the Ali Baba restaurant, there were three waiters; at the start of summer there were 14.

Two of the city’s six major hotels have closed, and the biggest of the survivors had 30 weekend reservations for its 150 rooms.

About 95% of Jordan’s imports and exports flow through Aqaba, which faces the Israeli port of Eilat across the bay. But in the past decade most of what has moved through Aqaba, from butter to guns, has not been for Jordan but for Iraq.

Violence in Lebanon and eight years of war between Iran and Iraq made peaceful Aqaba a strategic port and fairly well to do. Its population doubled in a decade, and by 1988 tourists from Scandinavia and Europe had discovered its winter sun and clear waters.

“This was a city of full employment,” Kakish said. “In fact, there was a labor shortage, and many Egyptians worked here. By now, I think we have lost 5,000 jobs.”

In early summer, Aqaba serviced around 20 merchant ships a day. Since U.N. sanctions went into effect, the number has fallen to two or three. Cargo consigned to Jordan is being unloaded at foreign ports, and cargoes that manage to get here carry almost prohibitive war-risk insurance added to the usual transport charges.

Kakish, who oversees regional development on behalf of the Amman government, says several thousand jobs have been lost at the port. Of 11,000 trucks normally on the road to and from Aqaba, only 2,000 are left. Tourism, worth $150 million to Aqaba last year, is finished. Local commerce is dying.

Twice-daily ferries to Egypt once brought 11,000 people a day through Aqaba. Now, the ferries leave full of Egyptian refugees from Kuwait and Iraq and come back empty.

Habib Wahib, the Arizona-educated son of the Lebanese owner of the Ali Baba restaurant, said: “A year ago it was impossible to get a table here. Now look--nothing. Our business is off 80%.”

At the Alcazar, Sawalha said he will close and lay off his 85 workers unless, improbably, there is good news by Oct. 15. That is about the same time, he said, that the last of the seven horse-drawn carriages he ordered built for the tourist season will be ready. And what will he do with the eight horses he bought to pull them?

The United States and other countries that support the sanctions against Iraq have pledged billions to compensate Jordan for its losses, but it is scant solace to the people of Aqaba.

If hardly anything comes into the port, not much goes out, either. Hundreds of tons of phosphate, Jordan’s principal export, is backing up for want of ships; potash, too. Fertilizer, another major export, relied for its manufacture on sulfur and ammonia from Iraq and Kuwait.

If outsiders are tempted to lay Aqaba’s trauma at the door of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, that is not the way people in Aqaba see it. They are affronted by what they call an American double standard.

Ahmed Haayari, director of customs at Aqaba, said the West rushed to implement sanctions to enforce its demands for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, but nobody in the West is bothered by Israel’s refusal to honor U.N. resolutions calling for the withdrawal from Arab lands it occupied in wartime.

“No one wants war, but if war comes it will be a jihad, a holy war,” Haayari said. “We will quit our jobs and go to fight for Iraq. We don’t hate you, but if war comes we will hate you.”