A war next door may wreck Jordan's economy and prompt politicalunrest. But, as Michael Jansen reports from Amman, some Iraqi refugees may be able to go home.
Amman, like Baghdad 1,000 km to the east, is waiting for war.
"If a man is planning to add a room to his house, he puts it off to see what happens. If someone wants to buy a car, he postpones. A friend delayed an operation because he did not want to be on the operating table when the war begins," Anis says.
Jihane agrees. "We are buying only essentials and hanging on to our money. No one knows how the war will go but we all know that prices will go up."
Everyone in Jordan believes a war next door in Iraq will wreck this country's economy and, perhaps, prompt political unrest. Jordan is dependent on Iraq, which provides all of the kingdom's oil - half for free, half at half the market price - and buys 40 per cent of its exports.
Jordan has stocked up on oil in anticipation of war and the US is said to have promised to find another supplier. But no one can match Iraq's terms.
"Petrol is essential - for cars, lorries delivering goods, heating, to fire the ovens for making bread," Jihane observes. "Every 10 years, just when it seems we are beginning to sort out our economy, something happens," she remarks.
Twelve years ago George Bush snr attacked Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, devastating Jordan's economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Amman was swamped with Lebanese refugees from their civil war and Israel's invasion of their country.
"Prices of flats and even fruits and vegetables went sky-high. We couldn't afford to live in our own country," Jihane says.
In 1967 half a million Palestinian refugees flooded into the kingdom when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. They are still here. While war in the east could send a wave of Iraqi refugees across the desert to the border, where they will be accommodated in tent camps, Jordan is far more concerned about the possibility that Israel will use the cover of war to "transfer" thousands of Palestinians across the Jordan River into the kingdom.
The Israeli press reported last week that King Abdullah met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in an effort to secure assurances that there will be no "transfer". But the palace has neither confirmed nor denied the report.
"The government tells us nothing," Selma complains. Uncertainty is the mother of worry. "Jordanians are anxious. But this has given way to anger. People are very angry at America for creating another crisis," she remarks.
It is a beautiful day. The low grey skies bringing rain, sleet and snow have become pale blue. Across the street from my modest hotel - formerly the US embassy - in the parking lot of the Intercontinental is a panel truck with a satellite dish on its roof, a range rover bearing the BBC logo and another with the letters "TV" on the driver's door. The world press is also waiting for war.
The Intercontinental is where they gather. The Ministry of Information office in the lobby has registered 500 foreign journalists, 100 of them from elsewhere in the Arab world. Everyone is applying for passes to go to the border with Iraq, now a restricted military zone. CNN has taken over the best hotel at the frontier town of Ruwaished. Refugees are a big story.
Amman and Baghdad are cousins. When Britain carved Jordan and Iraq out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first World War, two brothers, Abdullah and Faisal, were placed on the thrones of the two new countries.
Jordan's present King Abdullah II is the great-grandson of Jordan's first king. The grandson of Iraq's monarch was murdered during the country's 1958 revolution. When Faisal became ruler of Iraq, Baghdad was a grand cosmopolitan city. On the banks of the meandering Tigris stood medieval mosques, palaces and handsome houses built in yellow brick.
But Abdullah I's capital, Amman, was a poor settlement of Kurds and Circassians crowding the Philadelphia, a Roman amphitheatre located in a bowl formed by seven hills.
Today Amman sprawls over those hills and beyond, a city of pink and rose stone. Handsome, spanking new, somewhat raw, a city divided into neighbourhoods by hills rather than united by the Tigris, as is Baghdad. Downtown in chilli stalls near the Philadelphia, the poorest of the 300,000 Iraqi refugees living in Jordan sip syrupy tea from small glasses and wait for the war which will devastate their country but could enable them to go home.