Word: baghdad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Making up for eight weeks spent in the hospital recovering from an assassin's bullets, Iraq's Premier Karim Kassem turned to unfinished business. In his headquarters inside Baghdad's ugly yellow brick Defense Ministry, he put seven committees to work on crash programs, one reorganizing the army (and negotiating with Moscow for arms), a second restudying Iraq's foreign policy, another drafting a new constitution, a fourth drawing up an electoral law to regulate the long-promised return of "normal" political activity on Jan. 6. By that date Kassem himself hopes to reassert his position...
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...
...Hussein still dreams of succeeding to the vanished Iraqi throne of his murdered cousin, King Feisal, came reports of troop and aircraft movements toward the Iraqi border. And on Iraq's southern frontier, Saudi Arabian agents, anxious to prevent either Hussein or the Communists from taking power in Baghdad, moved among border tribesmen spreading money and promises...
...Baghdad itself, daily bulletins continued to insist that Kassem was recovering nicely from his wounds, would soon leave the hospital. On that happy day, Iraqi citizens were promised free admission to movie theaters, half fare on trains, and free circumcision for their newborn sons. But like any other Arab strongman, Kassem derives his power less from the people than from the army. At week's end, from his hospital bed, "the sole leader'' made a public declaration of confidence in the loyalty of his troops: "I can assure you there is not in the whole...