Word: iraq
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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...
...Valley. Unlike the rulers of neighboring Saudi Arabia (TIME, Dec. 19), Nuri believes that Iraq's oil wealth should be used for the advancement of its people rather than the enrichment of its. royal princes. As Premier, he presides over a ten-man, nonpolitical National Development Board that by law gets 70% of state oil revenues, and spends the money ($204 million in 1955) on a vast plan to recreate in the Valley of the Two Rivers the sort of terrestrial paradise that existed there before the marauding Mongols under Hulagu Khan wrecked its irrigation system...
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...
...floodwaters for the first time and lead them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream, other contractors are digging drainage ditches and scooping silt from the ancient Babylonian water-distribution canals, now scheduled to be used again as in Hammurabi's time. In upper Iraq, a French firm is building a $28 million concrete dam at Dokan...
...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...