IRAQ: One Down

Already on the skids, aggressive young Army Colonel Abdul Salam Mohammed Aref, 38, who longed to be the Nasser of Iraq, had to take a much harder bump last week. A month ago Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kassem removed his fellow conspirator in the Baghdad revolt from the army second-in-command. Last week, as armored cars trundled through the streets, Baghdad radio broadcast that “in the public interest” Aref had been dismissed from his two ministerial posts and banished to the ambassadorship to West Germany. Two other Cabinet ministers, who wanted union now with Nasser, also lost their posts.

Kassem pronounced himself still an admiring brother of Nasser, but he was plainly not ready to become a satellite. Instead, he pushed on with his own Nasser-like program in Iraq. Kassem created a new state agency empowered to strip Iraq’s feudal landlords of all but 250 acres of irrigated land, 500 acres of nonirrigated land. Within five years, the state promised to hand out this land to peasants in parcels of 7 to 30 acres, set up cooperatives to help the peasants get started, and pay off the expropriated owners in 20-year government bonds. Kassem was taking on what old Nuri asSaid, for all his enlightened oil-revenue spending, never dared tackle—the opposition of feudal landholders who have wielded almost absolute local power, and in cases exacted up to 90% of tenants’ earnings as rent, and in their own courts could inflict even flogging on sharecroppers who defrauded.

If Kassem can bring off land reform, he will not need to worry about his popularity with the Iraqi masses who were busy last week snipping out Aref’s face from the posters saluting “Kassem and Aref, Heroes of the Revolution.”