IRAQ: The Shakeout

Two months after the revolt that swept away King Feisal II and the regime of Nuri asSaid, Baghdad is an armed camp. It simmers with hatred for the foreigner. Its dusty streets are oppressive with the sense of suppressed violence. Cops and soldiers with planted bayonets guard hotel entrances. Armored cars bristle before public buildings and jeep-mounted recoilless 106-mm. guns glower down the broad avenues, presumably on guard against the “corruption” and “imperialist aggressors” the Baghdad radio so ceaselessly attacks. Barefoot young people rove the banks of the Tigris, singing patriotic songs and shouting: “Nasser, Nasser.” Every wall and shopwindow in town bears the image of the idol of the Nile—or that of Iraq’s own Revolutionary Chief Karim Kassem.

Glitter Gone. The new regime is still wreaking its vengeance on the old. Last week the government prosecutor demanded the head of U.S.-educated ex-Premier Fadhil Jamali. Jamali’s chief crime: taking Iraq into the Baghdad Pact. Cried the prosecutor: “God ordained that we should have one head left out of those destroyed at the hands of the people. God be praised for these blessed hours in which the enemy of the people stands in the prisoner’s dock before the People’s Court.”

But the first glitter of the revolution has dimmed. The sandalmakers, smiths and petty merchants in the capital’s dark-shadowed bazaars have found that life goes on much as before, with the rich a bit poorer and the poor no richer. Petty politicians grumble that they have not been allowed to form parties. Intellectuals complain that all but three Baghdad newspapers have been closed down (under Nuri asSaid there were nine).

There are signs of trouble in the top leadership. Grizzled General Kassem is no man to be taken for another Naguib. After the July revolution his right-hand man, Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Mohammed Aref, rushed to Damascus to share Nasser’s balcony, returned promising quick Arab unity through union with Nasser’s U.A.R., seemed to be challenging Kassem’s leadership. Touring the country making rabble-rousing speeches, Aref promised to strip landlords of their vast holdings, foreigners of more of treir oil profits. But Iraq’s big Kurdish minority fear they might be submerged altogether in a pan-Arab nation. Minority groups began to stage counterdemonstrations against the unionists in the midst of Aref’s meetings. Word spread that Prime Minister Kassem favored “gradualism” in relations with the U.A.R.

Lie Laid. “They say there are differences,” roared Aref. “They lie, and God curses them.” He spoke with the confidence of a man who had lived, worked and slept on the floor of the same office with Kassem in the first days of the revolt. But fortnight ago Baghdad radio abruptly announced that “in the public interest,” Aref had been relieved as second-in-command of the armed forces. “Aref is young and inexperienced,” explained a Cabinet minister. “He talked too much.” Aref still holds his jobs as Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister, still heads the revolution’s pro-Nasser faction. His differences with Kassem are not yet a rift. Argued a government official smoothly: “I doubt whether Nasser at this time would even accept an Iraqi offer to unite with the U.A.R. It would be impossible, for instance, for a foreigner to carry through land reform without opening grievous wounds.”

Communist good-will missions have flocked to Baghdad. But Kassem so far has been noncommittal. In the first outburst of nationalist zeal, Kassem fired all the British military advisers and jailed the chiefs of the Iraq Development Board, thereby slowing its activities to a near halt. But he has made no move to expropriate the big British-run Iraq Petroleum Co., or to back up Aref’s demands for a greater share of its profits. Despite his radio’s anti-U.S. propaganda, he continues to keep up warm and friendly relations with Western diplomats. For the moment, as Nasser watches narrowly, Iraq simmers uncertainly under gradualism’s tight lid.