Word: es
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last February Iraq became the first of the new Arab nations to break away from Middle East isolationism and to cast its lot openly with the West in the Baghdad pact. That decision was largely made by one man, Premier Nuri es-Said, 67, onetime officer in Ottoman Turkey's army, who is regarded by many as the ablest statesman in the Middle East. Last week Nuri was busy putting together a new administration. In one of those sudden flare-ups that happen in the Middle East (and rate a baffling, brief paragraph in the U.S. press), Nuri...
Over the opposition of out-of-office politicians, who denounced it as the wicked instrument of foreign powers (a British economist and a U.S. irrigation specialist sit on the board), Nuri es-Said has nursed the program through its first four years with a minimum of political graft. Today Iraq, a land of 80% illiteracy, $84-per-capita income and endemic trachoma, bilharziasis and malaria, stands on the threshold of economic expansion. It took courage to concentrate on long-term investments when demagogues demanded relief here and now. but the first fruits of Iraq's wisdom are beginning...
...board plans five other major dams in the north, and recently let a $32 million contract for one of these, the Derbendi Khan, to the American J. A. Jones Construction Co. "Give us 30 years," says Nuri es-Said, "and if nothing goes wrong, Iraq will have 15 million to 16 million acres under cultivation. That will be more than twice what Egypt has." It will also be twice as much as Iraq now tills...
...Nuri es-Said's program, in the view of one Washington observer, "is by far the most enlightened and far-seeing program of national development and use of oil revenues anywhere in the Middle East." Yet "Iraq's tragedy," says one American specialist, "is that she needs everything but money." The financing of Nuri's program inside the country was made vastly more difficult when 123,000 dissatisfied Jews migrated to Israel and drained the country of much of its banking and commercial skills. Its realization will be all the harder because too few Iraqis know...
Pillar of Wisdom. For 25 years Nuri es-Said, who after breaking with the Turks fought heroically beside Lawrence of Arabia in his World War I desert campaigns, has dominated Iraqi politics. He shares control of the country with 20 or so feudal sheiks and big Baghdad landholders. At the last election in 1954, Nuri es-Said and his sheiks obviously had things well under control: on election day, 122 of the 135 parliamentary seats were uncontested. Democracy this may not be, but by Middle East standards, it is good government. Now in his 15th premiership and growing frail...