Word: kassim
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...Revolution which Kassim led was rooted in Iraqi and Arab Nationalism, just as Castro drew strength from Cuban and Latin-American aspirations. Both leaders lacked Communist Party support at the outset; in each case the Party opportunistically gained an entree into the Revolutionary governments, and the organized Left helped fill gaps in the ruling cadres. Just as Castro villified the U.S. as a self-interested upholder of the regime which he had crushed, so Kassim assailed the British. Quite contentedly, Moscow cheered them both...
Three months after the Kassim government came to power, the British were selling him arms; their technicians were helping him reorganize his economy; their statesmen and industrialists were offering aid in a variety of areas. And all this, while Iraq was withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact, while the Communists waved Kassim's portrait in the May Day Parade, and while the press in both Iraq and Britain enjoyed and orgy of mutual slander which is only now beginning to abate. The British took these violent insults, even from Kassim himself, diplomatically. They didn't alter their foreign policy...
...result of this approach, the Communist Party is today shorn of power in Iraq. Instead of flaunting political and economic hostility when Kassim began trade with Russia, the English set out to replace their discarded economic relations with more equitable trade agreements. Kassim was not forced, therefore, to regear his economy; Soviet trade could complement, but not dictate, Iraqi development...
...Communist Party, seeing its postion threatened by this rapprochement, overplayed its hand in seeking to usurp further power. Fortunately, Kassim had not been placed in a position wherein his only alternative was to sacrifice the autonomy of his Revolution to Communist aims...
Charging that many of the top officials of the old government encouraged his smuggling, Kassim told how once the late Governor General Ghulam Mohammed had ordered him to treat "as his own brothers" three Arabs whom he asked Kassim to assist in smuggling into Karachi two shipments of gold. Kassim also incriminated associates of former President Iskander Mirza and ex-Prime Ministers Noon and Suhrawardy, as well as 18 top Karachi police and customs officials. No matter which politicians were in power, he said, their henchmen demanded payoffs, and when he tried to quit the rackets they would...