King’s Speech Draws Rebuke From Bush : Jordan: ‘It’s clear he has taken up their cause,’ Fitzwater says of support for Iraq. But monarch’s message was intended for home audience, some say.

Abandoning efforts to avoid a further rupture in U.S.-Jordanian relations, President Bush on Friday angrily denounced King Hussein’s declaration of support for Iraq, saying that the king appears “to have moved over, way over, into the Saddam Hussein camp.”

The sharp dispute between Washington and Amman was caused by a speech King Hussein gave Wednesday in which he voiced strong support for the Iraqi people and said the allied assault on Iraq was “a war against all Arabs and Muslims, not only against Iraq.”

As the Bush Administration’s view of Jordan and its king grew suddenly harsh Friday, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Jordan has “declared its allegiance to Iraq.”

“It’s clear he has taken up their cause,” Fitzwater said.

On Thursday, the White House said the United States was reviewing its financial commitments to Jordan, suggesting that fundamental changes in U.S. policy toward that nation may be in store. Washington had earmarked $35 million in economic aid and $20 million in military aid for Jordan this year, roughly half of the American aid that country received in 1990, according to the State Department.

Throughout the Persian Gulf crisis, the United States has avoided taking a tougher approach toward King Hussein. An effort to look the other way while Jordan circumvented economic sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council on Iraq had been a way to recognize Jordan’s traditionally close links with neighboring Iraq as well as its dependence on Iraqi oil. It also reflected an expectation that the king would be a crucial player in any long-term settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But two days after reacting mildly to King Hussein’s speech, the White House said Friday that the king was participating in Saddam Hussein’s effort to alienate the Arab world from the United States.

Initially, Bush had said he had a “major disagreement” with the king. But he also said: “I have tried to understand the pressure that King Hussein is under. . . . You have to listen to the rhetoric and understand why it’s being used out in that part of the world.”

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that official reaction changed after the king’s speech was given a closer reading and was found to be “even worse” than it had first appeared. In addition, after Secretary of State James A. Baker III “got a lot of heat” when he visited Thursday with members of the Senate, it was decided that “we needed to not be seen as too limp on this issue,” the official said.

As upset as the White House appeared to be on Friday, the Jordanian monarch was thought to be equally angry with Washington--despite his personal ties to Bush, whom he visited at the President’s vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., last August, shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The relationship was made worse by recent allied bombing attacks on Jordanian trucks carrying crude oil from Iraq to Jordan along the Baghdad-Amman road. Jordan told the United Nations on Friday that 14 truck drivers were killed between Jan. 29 and Feb. 5 in air attacks inside Iraq on vehicles belonging to Jordanian companies. Jordan said another 26 people were injured and 50 trucks were damaged or destroyed in the attacks.

A senior White House official has said that the road on which the trucks were traveling was known to be used by Iraq’s mobile Scud missile launchers. In addition, the route was considered to be a “military highway,” and the oil trucks were interspersed with vehicles thought to be carrying missiles, the official said.

In Jordan, officials feel that the oil trucks were deliberately targeted to put pressure on the king to abandon what he sees as a neutral position in the Persian Gulf War and join with the allies. And they see Washington’s angry response to the king’s speech as providing a final push that will, instead, force the king off the fence and into Saddam Hussein’s arms.

With Jordan’s population turning increasingly toward Islamic fundamentalism and with hundreds of thousands of pro-Iraqi Palestinians living in Jordanian refugee camps, the king’s speech was seen in Jordan as having been intended primarily for a domestic audience. The senior White House official concurred with that assessment.

Nevertheless, Bush said during a picture-taking session at the start of a meeting with Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella of Argentina that “there’s quite some concern now about what appears to be a shift in the Jordanian position. . . . This complicates things.”

Even so, several current and former officials predicted that the U.S.-Jordanian relationship would eventually be patched up.

“Despite the heartburn which this latest speech has given to the White House, I do think cooler heads at the top will prevail,” said Richard Viets, a former U.S. ambassador to Jordan.

“The President’s policy from the outset has been to preserve the king and Jordan. I don’t think this speech, irritating as it may have been to him, has changed the view that there is a need for a stable and ‘moderate’ Jordan,” Viets said in an interview.

Staff writer Mark Fineman in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this story.