The New Garden of Eden

After 700 years in the dark ages, the ancient land where agriculture dawned and civilization first lit the planet is stirring again. Sudden wealth has been thrust upon the Kingdom of Iraq, carved just 35 years ago out of the Ottoman Empire's holdings in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates--the land once known as Mesopotamia. The oil that calked the walls of Babylon and may have fired the furnace through which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego walked unscathed now bubbles through huge pipelines to the Mediterranean. Its flow is so fabulous that it makes Iraq (pop. 5,000,000) the world's sixth petroleum-producing country.

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 had gone to his 20-year-old king, Feisal II, to quit. Two hours later he had a new Cabinet, chosen to speed up the domestic-reform program Iraq has launched on the wave of oil royalties.

Oil in the 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 in 1258.

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 to ripen.

By the Rivers of Babylon. The development board has already built irrigation dams across the Tigris and Euphrates north of Baghdad, while dams, channels and dikes gouged by German, French, British and American contractors will catch next spring's 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.

The 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.

The board is also busy with other good works: $50.4 million for schools, hospitals and other public buildings, $75 million for roads and bridges. Its new $30 million refinery provides Iraq with gasoline at 15-c- a gallon (though heavy taxes lift it up to 29-c- a gallon). Ancient, reeking Baghdad (pop. 550,000), which bears almost no resemblance to the flower-decked Arabian Nights pleasure dome that the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809) shared so opulently with 2,000,000 subjects, is getting low-cost housing, a sewage system, some badly needed modern streets, and the promise of room to expand now that the Tigris can be curbed.

Nuri es-Said's program, in the view of one Washington observer, "is by far the most enlightened and far-seeing program of national development and use of oil revenues anywhere in the Middle East." Yet "Iraq's tragedy," says one American specialist, "is that she needs everything but money." The financing of Nuri's program inside the country was made vastly more difficult when 123,000 dissatisfied Jews migrated to Israel and drained the country of much of its banking and commercial skills. Its realization will be all the harder because too few Iraqis know or care what the program is all about.

Some of Nuri's advisers foresee the need for a widespread system of fundamental education. Now that the government has built a new printery and a $3,200,000 bitumen plant, the board has to rush construction of the first schools so men can be trained to staff them.

Pillar of Wisdom. For 25 years Nuri es-Said, who after breaking with the Turks fought heroically beside Lawrence of Arabia in his World War I desert campaigns, has dominated Iraqi politics. He shares control of the country with 20 or so feudal sheiks and big Baghdad landholders. At the last election in 1954, Nuri es-Said and his sheiks obviously had things well under control: on election day, 122 of the 135 parliamentary seats were uncontested. Democracy this may not be, but by Middle East standards, it is good government. Now in his 15th premiership and growing frail and hard of hearing, Nuri is inclined to leave to his successors such matters as educating Iraqis to use the big public works his government is creating.

But he is firmly convinced that Iraq's foreign policy, its new commitment to the West, has now been shaped for a long time to come. "Look," he says, "the Baghdad pact goes on whether I die or retire or get voted out." He added characteristically: "Before we signed it, I got the approval of every ex-Prime Minister [Iraq has half a dozen]. Any Prime Minister we would get to replace me would be already committed to the pact."

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