Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...week after the overthrow of Iraq's Dictator Abdul Karim Kassem. the crack of rifle fire still echoed in Baghdad's Liberation Square. Tanks and armored cars kept stern vigil at every important intersection. Scurrying everywhere were the little squads of men wearing green armbands-ferrets who sought to find and to crush the last remaining opposition to Rebel President Abdul Salam Aref and his mysterious revolutionary backers...
...Hotel for the inevitable press conference with the swarm of foreign correspondents, an ordeal he seemed to regard as in some ways worse than the historic night of the coup itself. More than a hundred shouting reporters and photographers pushed aside his tommy-gun-waving guard and crowded around Iraq's boss to hear Aref speak freely about the aims and purposes of the new government. He said something about an end to one-man rule, friendship with all Arab states, and the "overcoming of all the difficulties facing the Iraqi people." But he was mysteriously silent about...
...reason for such secrecy seems to be a general revulsion against the self-glorification of Kassem's four-year dictatorship. "We revolted against the cult of personality,'I explained new Foreign Minister Talib Hussein Shabib. 32. To the key question of who is boss of the new Iraq, the answer seems to be: at the moment, no one man. President Aref cannot make major decisions without the concurrence of the mysterious National Council...
...closely linked to the Baath (renaissance) Party. More an idea than an ideology, the basic Baath doctrine insists that "there are no Arab nations; there is only one Arab nation." This creed is, of course, warmly embraced by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Aref and Iraq's Baath Party seem hardly eager to fall under Cairo's domination. The Baathist leaders in Iraq, in fact, have reshaped their doctrine of Arab unity into a concept of federation of Arab states without a centralized dictatorship. This could mean anything, including a revival of the old concept...
There was plenty of that. Half of Iraq's army was tied down by a rebellion of the Kurdish tribesmen north and east of Mosul. Kassem began to grow suspicious of Iraq's Communists; after a series of Red-inspired strikes, Kassem jailed hundreds of Reds and condemned to death 28 Communist leaders...