The violence brings Syria’s two-day toll to nearly 100, and the overall death toll in the two weeks since they announced a deal with the Arab League to over 400. The Arab League initially gave Syria 15 days to implement the deal but suspended their membership over the weekend when it became clear that no reforms were actually taking place.

Arab League officials have continued to express concern about the situation in the wake of the suspension and have given Syria a deadline of Wednesday to implement some non-specified subset of the reforms, threatening further moves if they refuse. Jordan’s King Abdullah has urged Syrian President Assad to step down.

Syrian officials, for their part, continue to feign befuddlement at the Arab League’s anger, and announced today that they will be boycotting the Arab Games in Qatar to protest their suspension. Syrian officials insist that the Arab League suspension is a US plot.

Scores of activists burned American and Israeli flags outside the embassy, chanting ”The people want the Americans out.”

About half of Jordan’s 6 million residents are displaced Palestinians and it has long been thought that Israeli policy means to push remaining Palestinians in the West Bank into Jordan, something Jordan’s King Abdullah II has spoken out strongly against.

But Israeli encroachment wasn’t the only concern of the demonstrators who, like many of their counterparts in the Arab Spring, reject American imposition. The US has given billions in economic and security aid to the government of Jordan despite serious human rights abuses and has cooperated with the Jordanian government on rendition and torture, among other policies.

Israel has decided to close the Israeli Embassy in Jordan as members of this protest demonstration planned a corresponding “million-man march” outside the Israeli Embassy for later in the week.

Police started arresting the Salafi Trend members late Friday, accusing them of bringing swords and bundles of barbed wire to protests to attack police with. Six police were reported stabbed during the Amman rallies, but Srour put the total number injured at 83.

Protesters have taken to the streets for months in Jordan, demanding reforms which would allow voters to elect their government, which is currently entirely appointed by the king. The king swapped out governments in early February in hopes of convincing protesters that they were a more reformist bunch.

But now officials including nominally “reformist” Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit are openly threatening to crush the protests to “ensure security.” Members of the nation’s Islamist opposition party have warned the government against any hasty moves against demonstrators.

This week was the seventh consecutive Friday for the Jordanian protesters, and the most organized violence we saw with a number of people repotedly wounded in the attacks. Witnesses say the police stood by while the beatings went on.

The protests in Jordan saw the King sack his entire government on February 1, appointing former Prime Minister Bakhit as the “new” reformist prime minister, which sparked all the more anger because his previous administration’s efforts at reform failed miserably.

The overall theme amongst the protests is a demand that they be allowed to elect their prime minister and their senators. Currently the king appoints every cabinet position and all senators, while voters only get to select members of the relatively powerless lower house of parliament.

But having struggled to remain as non-commital as possible and reversing course several times during the course of Egypt’s 2+ weeks of revolution, the Obama Administration’s credibility in unquestioningly backing harsh dictators is fading, as is the belief by those dictators that the president’s seal of approval guarantees their hegemony.

To that end, the Obama Administration is reportedly trying to reassure King Abdullah II that the US government has a “long-term commitment” to seeing his rule continue, praising his “political and economic reforms” even as protesters march in the streets.

For Jordanians, the issue is clear: the current system allows them only to elect the relatively powerless lower house of parliament, while the entire upper house, the entire cabinet and the prime minister are all appointed by the king.

For the Obama Administration, the notion that 80 million Egyptians might at some point get free elections is already something of a culture shock – officials were quite comfortable with them under the yoke of an ageless dictator. For Jordan to “fall” as well, by which of course we mean “fall to freedom,” is a terrifying prospect for officials committed to the stability of the region as a bastion of tyranny, and the promise to support Jordan is likely not a false one, though it remains to be seen if the administration can do much of anything in the face of popular revolutions.

The intelligence failures in Egypt have undoubtedly led to a lot of second guessing, and the Obama Administration’s constant speeches trying to catch up with a changing story only underscored an intelligence community that was totally lost from the beginning to the very end.

But while officials continue to give lip-service to the idea of “stability” in the region and the CIA insists they have formed a new 35-man “task force” to try to guess where the next revolt will be, the reality is there are an awful lot of candidates left and an awful lot of unrest to go around the region.

Surely, the obvious “next” candidate is Yemen, which not only has the same sort of multi-decade ruling US backed dictator as Egypt, and a number of active secessionist movements. But protests are also continuing in Jordan, cropping up in Algeria and Morocco, and Libya and Syria both seem to be at risk as well.

Perhaps the biggest wild-card out there, however, is in Bahrain, where the king has tried to bribe his way out of trouble by offering a “gift” of $3,000 to every family. This may work for awhile (at least until the checks clear), but Bahrain clearly has long-standing unrest and, should it fall, that unrest could easily spread to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

And don’t forget that fledgling dictatorship in Iraq, either. Prime Minister (and Interior Minister and Defense Minister, etc) Nouri al-Maliki is clearly centralizing power at an alarming rate, a problem doubly concerning since his bloc lost the 2010 elections. This, coupled with the usual incompetence one expects of the US installed regime, has led to growing protests in a nation which still has 50,000 US troops occupying it.

The answer really is that such unrest can crop up virtually anywhere in the region, and nearly every government in the region has made a lot of enemies over the years which, in the face of the current economic downturn, feel they have less and less to lose by open revolt.

King Abdullah had sought to quiet the protests earlier this week by firing the entire cabinet and replacing it with a new prime minister, albeit one with a history as a less-than-successful reformer.

This seems to have skirted the major issue for most of the protesters, however, which was that the Jordanian voters are not allowed to elect any of their Senators or any members of the cabinet – all are appointed by the king.

And though King Abdullah has promised “quick and tangible steps to launch true political reforms,” few expect serious changes in the system, which will, for now, keep many of them in the streets.

Jordanians have been protesting for the past week, demanding that the previous prime minister step down and allow free elections. Though King Abdullah indeed sacked Prime Minister Rifai and the rest of the cabinet yesterday, he moved today to appoint a new one, without any elections.

The ouster of Rifai was welcomed by many, but the appointment of Bakhit hardly suggests radical change, as he held the prime ministership from late 2005 to late 2007, promising all the while reforms that he was never able to deliver on.

Bakhit was also largely blamed by the religious opposition for the disputed 2007 election, as he angrily refused calls for independent monitors ahead of the vote, and glossed over reports of rampant bribery after it.

The move was something of a surprise, as Jordan’s protests so far had been comparatively small compared to, say, the full-on revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, though they did demand free elections as well as the end of Rifai’s cabinet.

Which was never really up to Rifai, as demonstrated by his summary ouster by the king. Rather, while protesters seemed reluctant to criticize the king himself, it is the system where the entire Senate, the entire cabinet, and the Prime Minister are appointed by fiat that is the issue here.

Thus it seems, while there may be some relief at seeing Rifai on the outs, that the Jordanian protesters who were hoping to actually elect their leaders are going to be disappointed in a few days, or weeks, when King Abdullah appoints his next Rifai and expects the situation to normalize.

Rather, the Obama Administration came at the cost of increased aid to the Jordanian government, in effect meaning the government was renting out its troops to the US as mercenaries to play a ro le in the ongoing Afghan occupation.

Jordanian officials appeared quite keen on offering major escalations in January of 2010, having already made it clear that any such offers would require payment in this regard.

Indeed, Ambassador Beecroft saw that the Jordanian government was so eager to make such a deal that he predicted that the US could secure the troops “at cost.” It is unclear, of course, exactly how much the Jordanian troops actually cost, so it is unclear if the US managed to get such a “good deal” on its troops.