IRAQ: The Shattered Mask

Through his first frenzied months in office, Iraq’s lean and ascetic Premier Karim Kassem snatched a few hours sleep nightly on a couch near his office desk. Visitors to his Baghdad Defense Ministry headquarters were impressed by his tightly reined self-control and the masklike grin he wore. But the assassin’s bullets that crumpled his left shoulder last October seem to have shattered the mask, and perhaps shattered Kassem’s tight self-control as well.

Kassem’s public utterances, at first so mild, impersonal and idealistic through the bitter slanging match that raged between Iraq and Nasser’s United Arab Republic, have suddenly taken on a high emotional tone. To visitors at Baghdad’s As-Salaam Hospital, he declared last week that the Iraqi revolution had delayed World War III for several years. ”We were the reason for the rapprochement among the big powers,” he boasted.

Reviving the old Hashemite dream of a “Fertile Crescent” extending from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, he trumpeted that neighboring Syria is “inseparable from the Iraqi people.” and that Jordan “is still tied to the chariot of imperialism and when she wishes to recover her freedom we will be ready to help her.” Turning to Nasser, he poked at a tender spot: the Nasser-nurtured myth that Egyptians actually won a stunning victory in the Suez and Sinai fighting in 1956. He sneered at “the weak Egyptian army command” that could prevent “the Jews from capturing no fewer than 5,000 Egyptian prisoners, while the Egyptians were capturing only five Jews.”

The last bullet was successfully removed from Kassem’s left arm one day last week, and the Premier, clad in pajamas and silk dressing gown, strolled about the hospital. Once again, as it has before, word spread that Kassem would be out of the hospital “in a few days.”

It is high time. Things have been standing still in Iraq, in uneasy tension between the Communists and the conservatives. Though oil flowing to Western markets still brings Iraq royalties at the rate of $230 million a year, Kassem’s 16-month-old revolution has done little to better the Iraqis’ lot. Farmers, unsure whether the government will go through with land reform, have cut back on their planting. Eggs have tripled in price, rice costs 50% more, and wheat has become so scarce that authorities had to import 45,000 tons from Turkey two months ago to meet a bread shortage.