The issue of debt relief for Jordan is not a question of if, but when, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said this week.
The House Appropriations Committee has come under fire from the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and some Jewish groups for proposing to cut debt relief for Jordan from $275 million to $50 million. According to the debt-relief formula, the $275 would have erased all of Jordan’s remaining debt to the United States.
With the entire House preparing to take up the bill, which also includes budget cuts for many anti-poverty programs, Gingrich declared his support for forgiving Jordan’s full debt.
“The whole argument now is a matter of timing,” Gingrich told reporters at his daily news conference Wednesday.
:”No one has any arguments, because you’re not going to get the money back anyway,” Gingrich said. “You’re just keeping it on the books.”
The speaker accused Clinton of blowing the issue out of proportion.
Clinton’s press secretary, Michael McCurry, attacked the Republican-controlled Congress last week for attempting to derail the peace process.
Cutting the debt-relief package amounts to “yanking out one of the pillars of American leadership in the world,” McCurry said, adding that this move would take “away our ability to support and nurture the peace process” in the Middle East.
Clinton had promised Jordan’s King Hussein the debt-relief package last year, when Jordan agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
Calling McCurry’s attack “flagrantly inappropriate,” Gingrich said,”I have been reassured by the White House that it will not happen again.”
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