Jordan, Caught in Middle, Shows Signs of Panic; Anger Is Directed Against U.S. : War jitters: There is a last-minute rush to leave the country, and lines form outside markets and bakeries.

With the Middle East on the brink of war, signs of panic and protest Monday gripped Jordan, a country caught in the middle of potential adversaries.

Travel agents and airline offices reported a crush of last-minute--and too-late--demands for seats on the dwindling number of outbound planes. “There’s nothing available between now and the 20th, at least,” said Metri Twal, an agent in downtown Amman.

He estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 Jordanians have left the country in the last two weeks. Foreign diplomats, dependents and civilians are competing for the available space.

At markets and bakeries, lines formed early Monday morning--a sign of panic hoarding--after news of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar’s unsuccessful peace mission to Baghdad.

There were signs of anti-Western feeling as well. A CBS-TV crew filming a bread line was accosted by an angry crowd, which demanded its videotape and destroyed it.

The 4 million people of this country, at least half of them Palestinians, are increasingly agitated amid the currents of war, and the dominant mood seems to be pro-Iraqi. King Hussein’s careful diplomacy has steered Jordan through the shoals so far and averted outbreaks of open unrest. But tensions are rising.

Monday afternoon, nearly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the well-to-do Shmiesani district to a rally at a sports stadium on the edge of town, chanting anti-American slogans and waving flags of the Palestine Liberation Organization and posters of its chairman, Yasser Arafat.

The mood of the marchers was relaxed, but their minds were fixed on the polemics of the Persian Gulf crisis.

“If the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait is not legal, what do you say about the Israeli occupation of Palestine?” asked Ibrahim Deeb, a Palestinian merchant.

At the stadium, where Western television crews swarmed to film young Palestinians burning American and Israeli flags, a Jordanian hotel engineer dealt an anti-Western line.

“The moment America and Britain stepped into this (the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait), they messed it up. The Arabs could have solved it.”

Added Abdullah Aziz, a Palestinian architect: “We’re for (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein--all the Arab people in the street. This is our chance. We’ve been waiting many years to find a leader like him.”

Many of the protesters insisted that Jordan’s king has gotten their message. “He’s listening to the people now,” said one. “Government policy is closer to the streets.”

Western diplomats here agree that the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Jordan has brought the palace closer to the people, cementing the popularity of the king. They cite the shift as insurance against civil strife here unless the country gets caught up in a shooting war between its powerful neighbors, Israel and Iraq.

“The anger here is not directed at the palace,” one diplomat said. “It’s directed at the United States.”

So far, anti-Americanism has not reached a dangerous pitch, he said, “But it could get out of hand if people feel Arab dignity is being trampled.”

“The security forces, the army and the police, are very good,” remarked another foreign official. “They keep order where it’s necessary but are willing to let the people blow off some steam. The only internal problem might come from some shirttail Palestinian groups or isolated people who think they are talking to God.”

The growing Muslim fundamentalist movement in Jordan was rewarded earlier this month with more power in a new Cabinet.

But if the crisis divides the relationship between the country’s Palestinian population and the king’s Bedouin supporters, Jordan could be in trouble.

“Black September, 1970, is a living memory in Jordan,” noted another foreign analyst, recalling the civil war in which Hussein’s army drove the PLO out of the country. “If the social contract breaks down, there’ll be a lot of throats slit before it’s over.”

The immediate anxiety, however, rests with the threat of Jordan getting swept up in the gulf conflict.

On Sunday, in an elegant, high-ceilinged room of the French chancellery, embassy officials conducted what they termed “the distribution”--issuance of gas masks, protective suits and syringes of antidotes for biological agents to about two dozen women and children, mostly Arabs, of French citizenship.

“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” said a French diplomat. “We know it’s frightening just to look at it. There’s one chance in a million (that the suits and masks will be needed) here. Maybe in Tel Aviv or Baghdad, but not here.

“But the question is, do you do it now or after, when it would be too late?”

The Germans, Belgians and Spaniards have also issued protective suits to their citizens, according to diplomatic sources.

And in hotel rooms at the Jordan Inter-Continental, where most of the foreign media people are staying, reporters returned from Monday’s rally to find a candle on their bedside tables. Just in case.