Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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These days the most popular Arabian nights' entertainments are the televised trials staged in Baghdad by the Iraqi People's Court, under the presidency of Premier Karim Kassem's cousin, Colonel Fadhil Mahdawi. Premier Kassem himself is known to have turned on the television in the middle of a Cabinet session, listened to the colonel's brutal buffooneries and irrelevancies, and murmured: "What a jewel we have here." Last week, with 16 officers and one civilian on trial for their lives, accused of taking part in the Mosul army revolt in March, sheep-eyed, sheep-headed...
...labor movements paltered along in places like Britain until "the emergence of the Communist Party and the great Soviet Union, sincere friend of our democratic republic." When the applause died down, Defense Counsel Zainab popped up to say: "If my defense of the People's Court and the Iraqi people means that I am a Communist, then I have the honor to be so." Mahdawi read the verdicts amid a storm of applause: six officers to be shot, nine officers and the civilian sentenced for life, one officer acquitted...
...Bargain. In this planlessness and confusion of purposes lay the seeds of Iraq's present chaos. When Aref flew off to Damascus for a much-publicized meeting with Nasser, and Egyptian MIGs began operating on Iraqi airfields, Kassem recoiled, began looking for allies against the eloquent Aref and his Nasserite followers. The Communists, who, alone among Iraqi political parties, had emerged from Nuri's police state lean, hard and well organized, were only too ready to give Kassem the help he wanted-for a price...
...British policy of hands off in Iraq seems at first glance negligent. In fact, it is the only policy open to the West. For even if Washington and London trusted Nasser enough to back him in his fight against Kassem, Western support would only further discredit Nasser in Iraqi eyes-and in the eyes of the whole Arab world. And any attempt that the West might make to bring direct pressure to bear on Kassem could only serve to drive him finally and utterly into the arms of the Communists...
Converting Iraq into a satellite poses a serious economic problem: though the West could get along without Iraqi oil, Iraq could scarcely get along without Western markets for its oil unless Russia were prepared to buy it-and Russia has no real use for it. Yet should Moscow, because of these political and economic difficulties, order the Iraqi Communists to stop short of an all-out takeover, there is danger that the volatile Iraqi mob, which loves nothing so much as a winner, would begin to turn away from its Red heroes just as it has turned away from Nasser...