Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most Iraqis doubted whether Iraq (or Perownia, as their country is sometimes called) shone any brighter after 30 years of British control. The wretched fellahin are as wretched as ever, the elite of landowners and sheiks as firmly entrenched, and Iraq's economy as firmly tied to Britain's. The literacy rate is still somewhere between 5 and 10%; public health service is almost nonexistent...
What should rouse less comment than a friendly visit by a nephew to an uncle? But last week, when Hashimite nephew Prince Abdul Illah, Regent of Iraq, went to call on Hashimite uncle King Abdullah in the dingy Trans-Jordan capital of Amman, many an Arab politician fidgeted. That the Regent's fellow traveler was Nuri Es-Said Pasha, perennial Prime Minister of Iraq (temporarily out of office), did not add to their comfort. Arabs suspected that a familiar bee was buzzing in the Iraqis' sedarah.* With British prompting, they thought, the Hashimite family was talking of uniting...
That treaty insured British paramountcy in Iraq. It gave Britain: 1) the right to maintain two important bases; 2) management of the Iraqi State Railways and the oil port of Basra; 3) the monopoly of providing all foreign technical experts needed by the Iraqi Government...
...Shining Deed? Presiding serenely over the British machine is tall (6 ft.), urbane, 45-year-old Stewart Perowne, able adviser in Britain's Bagdad Embassy. Twenty years a Middle East hand, Perowne even more than the British Ambassadors (who come & go) symbolizes British rule in Iraq. Unlike most British officials, he openly plugs for a larger Hashimite kingdom. A favorite Perowne remark: "Iraq shines like a good deed in a naughty world...
Nuri Pasha knew that the British had insured oil-rich Iraq against Russian pressure as well as against bandits and djinns. If the Hashimites and their advisers who gathered in Amman last week decided on a customs and military union, it would be because the British thought the time had come for a stronger Hashimite state. But such things move slowly in the Arab world. Perhaps, as the Arabs say, union would be achieved bukra fil mishmish (tomorrow, when the apricots bloom)-a day which never comes...