Word: nasser
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...Mideast, too, one of the torchbearers of neutralism showed further signs of awakening. The U.A.R.'s Gamal Abdel Nasser, ranging himself against the Reds who surround Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, admitted that he once thought that Arab Communists were independent of Moscow. "But they were not," said Nasser; they were trying to sow dissension and "put us into spheres of influence...
None of this warranted unalloyed Western rejoicing. Soviet control of strategic Iraq would be a disastrously high price to pay for the education of Nasser-even if his new understanding should prove genuine and lasting. And the education of the Asian neutrals was being paid for in Tibetan blood. But if the moment of truth had, in fact, come for the "uncommitted" Afro-Asian nations, Communist imperialism might be in for tougher times in the years ahead...
...political prisoners and ex-officials, and its lampposts are periodically festooned with bodies. Kassem's Iraq is a place where once-eminent citizens disappear without a trace, a land where fortnight ago the dock workers of Basra, outraged by a friendly reference to Egypt's President Nasser, killed and mutilated a customs clerk and-the modern-day hallmark of Iraqi politics-dragged his body through the streets...
...population and saving them from dwelling in slums." Aside from this vague expression of good intentions, the new military rulers had no political program at all. But, because the tide of Arab nationalism was running high everywhere, Colonel Aref had a somewhat hazy idea for closer relations with Nasser's United Arab Republic. In Kassem's mind was a similarly muddled idea for setting up a neutralist Iraqi state...
...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...