The Pasha

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Short, plump and natty in a tan gabardine suit, Nuri asSaid, 13 times Prime Minister of Iraq, stepped down jauntily from his Vickers Viscount. His lips slightly parted, his hooded eyes darting back and forth as if not to miss a detail, he looked almost as if he were tasting the happy occasion.

Nuri, as he returned from Karachi, was a man who had recovered from his Suez crisis. The only Arab leader who has formally allied his country with the West, he found himself isolated last October when his chief partner, Britain, attacked (simultaneously with the hated Israelis) the biggest figure in Arab politics. Then, in the fury of Arab nationalism, it had seemed that Nuri and not Egypt's Nasser might be the one to fall. Now it was Nasser who had to fear isolation. Nuri was on top, and could survey his victory. In his hour of triumph, he resigned.

The resignation, in effect, put the seal of completion on one more term of office, the longest spell (34 months) that Iraq's durable strongman had ever stayed in the Premier's post. Even if he relinquished office, Nuri would still be the dominant figure in Iraq. But he knew that Iraq's boy king, Feisal II, would ask him to try again, and Nuri would have a chance to form a new government, with a widened Cabinet. In office or out, the adroit, 68-year-old Nuri is the senior Arab statesman of the Middle East, and the Middle East's strongest pro-Western statesman.

The land that Nuri presides over, the classic land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, is the size of California. Long known as Mesopotamia, oil-rich Iraq is now shaking itself free from the sand that has drifted over it for centuries.

Nuri and Nasser now contend for Arab leadership, but the rivalry between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile valleys is actually as old as civilization, which first dawned in their valleys. Then, competing empires reached out from Babylon and Thebes into the land between--the land of the Bible--and as the tides of conquest and reconquest ebbed and flowed, the children of Israel and other would-be neutrals were swept off now to Egyptian bondage, now to Babylonian captivity. Today, though faces in the modern Iraqi and Egyptian crowds often show startling similarity to the classic profiles on the ancient monuments around them, neither country can claim much identity with its distant past.

Today's rivalry for Arab leadership is in many respects frankly unequal. After almost four centuries of Ottoman misrule and neglect, Iraq counts fewer than 6,000,000 inhabitants; Egypt has more than 22 million. Egypt is Mediterranean, with a long record of Western influence; Iraq still feels the strong pull of its tribal past.

Yet Iraq has its geographical unity, its great river valley, and after three generations under a British-created monarch, its own political and economic institutions. Above all, it has oil. Among Arab states, Egypt and Syria lack the oil-creating wealth, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms the economy that can absorb it. Iraq, alone of all Arab nations, has both, and on the wave of its oil royalties it has launched an ambitious program of economic development that is transforming the political balances of the region.

Senior Statesman. In a part of the world where the old Ottoman title of Pasha is still popularly bestowed on all sorts of generals and paladins, Iraqis mean only one man when they speak of "The Pasha." His countrymen fear, respect, or stand in awe of Nuri; they do not love him, and though he has been managing their country's affairs since before most of them were born, few Iraqis know him as a human being. He rules them as a dictator, with an indifference to their opinion that verges on contempt.

Hunched over his dusty, paper-piled desk, with his big ears and jet-black bushy brows, Nuri looks like a grizzled old bear. He is ponderous of movement, quickly bored, and constitutionally unwilling to make a show of interest for politeness' sake. He dismisses an aide's idea with a casual wave of the hand that says, "You're a good boy but don't bother me with such nonsense." Worldly, infinitely experienced, he carries himself with the air of one who knows precisely where all the levers of power in his country are located, and therefore sees no point in explaining or persuading.

Not even the Egyptian embassy questions the Pasha's honesty. Syrian and Egyptian broadcasters have shouted "Traitor" and "Satan," denounced him as a stooge of the British and an Ottoman-style tyrant. He pays no heed. Every Iraqi knows how a half-century ago Nuri leagued with the Arab Patriot Jafar al-Askari to conspire against the Ottoman Turks, then fought on camelback for Emir Feisal in World War I's revolt in the Arabian desert.

"With the Resources Available." The greatest influence on his life, says Nuri, was a German colonel named Von Lossow, under whom he studied in Constantinople as a young Turkish army officer before World War I. During a classroom exercise one group of students was assigned to defend a fortified village, another to attack it. The student assigned to command the defenders announced that the town's fortifications were so out of date that it could never be defended, and that he was accordingly withdrawing to find a better place to fight.

Says Nuri: "The colonel stopped the exercise then and there and lectured us for 2 1/2 hours. He said that fortifications are always out of date. Even if you fortify a town today with the most modern methods, he said, it will be out of date tomorrow because of new weapons and tactics. He told us that the right spirit for a commander is to do the job with the resources he has available. It's his duty to use his brain and energy with what's at hand, even if the town falls in half an hour, and afterwards he is court-martialed and shot.

"That," says Nuri in his gravelly baritone, "gave me the idea I have followed all my life--to be practical, not idealistic. My critics always want the ideal. If everything comes as you like it, what's the use of ability? This is my doctrine: never be an idealist, use what's available, don't wait till everything is perfect and miss your chance."

Free for What? The Pasha's English, despite innumerable trips to Britain and a lifetime of intimate collaboration with Britons, is barely adequate, and he is no orator in Turkish, German, or even his native Arabic. Tapping a knee, waving a hearing aid as he gropes for words, he rasps out his objectives: "Arab unity and progress, to see universities here, and wealth, to close the gap between the Arabs and the advanced nations. There has been a certain amount of progress since my childhood, especially in the past ten or 15 years, but the gap is still big. It will take a generation to close. I don't believe any Arab leader should make dangerous, revolutionary changes. Changing the lives and minds of people cannot be done quickly. You cannot inject a child two days old with a serum and make him ten years old. Even if somehow you succeed, he will never be normal. We must always calculate the need for time in everything."

Corrosively realistic, Nuri thrusts aside such Nasser catch phrases as "positive neutrality" that might win him a transient popularity. Says Nuri: "History would curse me if I appealed to the emotion of the masses at the expense of the national interest. For a small country, neutrality can be catastrophic. Iraq is incapable of blocking East or West militarily, or of exploiting its oil itself. If we tried to be neutral, our oil would remain underground, poverty would spread above the ground, and Communism would triumph." If these seem strong words in the Arab world of today, they are the utterance of a strong man emerging at last in the strongest position of his life.

The Happy One. How this son of Baghdad came into the world with a pair of blue eyes is a story that Scheherazade might have told. Three centuries ago, there was a mullah in Baghdad named Lowlow who was intensely proud of the mosque under his care. One day an invading Persian army overran Baghdad. In the kind of insult that Persian Moslems of the Shiite rite delighted in visiting upon the holy places of the rival Sunni sect, a cavalry outfit stabled its horses in the mosque. Lowlow set forth for faraway Constantinople to tell the Sultan of Turkey of this sacrilege, and the journey on foot took six months. The Sultan was so enraged that he sent an army back to Baghdad with Lowlow. The Persians were driven out, but Lowlow found that his wife and children had been massacred. The Sultan compassionately awarded his family an allowance of 2 lire a month in perpetuity,* and for a new wife sent Lowlow a beautiful blue-eyed Turkish girl from the royal harem.

Blue-eyed Nuri asSaid ("Nuri the Happy One"), born in Baghdad in 1888, was the only son of Lowlow's descendant, Said Effendi al-Mudakikchi ("Mr. Said the Auditor"). For a boy of good family growing up in Ottoman Baghdad, the army was the only fit career, and Nuri went to a local Turkish military school that prepared candidates for the military academy in Constantinople. At twelve he nearly died of typhoid, but Baghdad's only doctor nursed him through, and in 1903 he was ready to make the hard trip to Constantinople and the three-year course at the academy. In a mule-team caravan with 72 other boys bound for the academy, he traveled 27 days across bandit-infested desert to Alexandretta and caught the boat for Constantinople. In all it was a 40-day trip that Nuri now makes in less than four hours by Iraqi-piloted Viscount.

The Covenanter. Commissioned a sublieutenant, Nuri rode back to Baghdad, slim, handsome in the mustache sprouted in Constantinople, and fiercely proud of his uniform. He became a platoon commander at a Persian border town, and fell in with Jafar al-Askari, a husky, bull-necked Arab a few years his senior. The two became fast friends, and in 1910, as one member of the family puts it, "they gave each other their sisters." Though in accordance with Arab custom Nuri was not introduced to his bride Naima till the wedding day, Jafar arranged for her to catch a glimpse of Nuri from a window a few weeks beforehand. "He was handsome --just as he is today," says Naima, who has borne him two sons (one of them, an R.A.F.-trained pilot, is chief of Iraq's rail system and airlines).

After the wedding the two young officers, their wives and mothers, set off by mule caravan for Constantinople, this time to attend staff college. Shortly after their arrival war broke out in the Balkans, and Nuri went off to the front, but he and Jafar became convinced that advancement was being systematically denied them because they were Arabs. "If we are foreigners, then let's be foreigners," said Nuri. He took over leadership of a cell in the secret Covenant society plotting Arab independence from the decadent and dying Ottoman empire. All cell members wore hooded red gowns at meetings to keep their identity secret from each other --except Nuri whose identity had to be known. Once one of the officers sent word to Nuri that he could not attend because of illness. Because his illness was known and his absence would betray his identity, Nuri dressed his own mother in the hooded robe, and she sat silently through the meeting to make the group add up to the right number.

Pillar of Coolness. Early in 1914, tipped that the Turks were aware of his plotting, Nuri fled Constantinople and joined a revolutionary group in Basra. There the British, who had entered World War I against Turkey, found Nuri in a hospital with a chest ailment. To them, he was still a Turkish officer; they packed him off to India as a prisoner, and put him in a hill camp to convalesce. Two years later, when the British backed Sherif Hussein's Arabian revolt in the desert, Nuri talked them into letting him join the movement. In the Arabian fighting, wrote T. E. (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) Lawrence afterward, "his courage, authority and coolness" marked him as an ideal leader. "Most men talked faster under fire, and acted a betraying ease and joviality. Nuri grew calmer."

At the Paris peace conference of 1919, where the Arabs got less than Lawrence promised them, Nuri saw his burnoosed leader, Prince Feisal, become drunk and disillusioned after learning that the French intended to grab Syria for themselves. Feisal hurled the seat cushions from his car at the Quai d'Orsay as he passed by.

The Arabs proclaimed Feisal King of Syria, and Nuri his chief of staff. Driven from Damascus by the French, Feisal was offered the Iraqi throne by the British. At a spot just 50 yards from the office he works in today, Nuri asSaid proudly stood by one day in 1921 for the enthronement of his wartime chief as first sovereign of Iraq.

Mandate & Mobs. "The moment I saw him," said famed Orientalist Gertrude Bell of Nuri, "I realized we had before us a supple force which we must either use or engage in difficult combat." Nuri, too, was confronted with the choice of combat or cooperation. He chose cooperation. For the first ten years the British ruled Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, and Nuri bossed the army. In 1930 he became Premier for the first time. Iraq was gradually gaining independence, though not fast enough to suit the hotheads.

When mobs drenched a policeman with gas and burned him alive, or pickaxed a British vice consul, Nuri smashed them and executed their leaders. Sometimes his friendliness to the British cost him office for a time. He was unable to persuade the British to make the kind of Palestine settlement he favored, and when the young state of Israel beat back the invading Arab armies, Iraq was the only Arab country that refused to sign any kind of truce with the victorious Israelis. (Nuri is as publicly demagogic about the Israelis as any Arab leader, and as privately aware of their right and capacity to exist.) At times, when Nuri was out of power, things got out of hand. He came back to power the last time in the summer of 1954, and applied his standard formula: he closed 18 newspapers, won a rigged election (by a majority second only to Nasser's 99.98% poll for President last year), abolished all parties and sent hundreds of Communists to jail. Then he strengthened the loyalty of his main props in power by resisting proposals to tax the landholding sheiks, who dominate the countryside, and hiking the pay of army and police officers.

To Suez & Back. It once was enough to put down disorder at home. But with the rise of Egypt's Nasser and the spread of Radio Cairo propaganda to all Arabs, Nuri found himself undercut from outside. Nuri's bold decision to sponsor the Baghdad Pact was denounced by Nasser as a sellout to "imperialism and Zionism." Other Arab leaders shied away. Jordan, pushed too-crudely by the British to join, expelled the British commander, Glubb Pasha, and placed its armies, with those of Syria and Saudi Arabia, under a common Egyptian command. Just before the Suez invasion, Iraq stood alone in the Arab world. Nasser's one "Arab nation" was gaining recruits everywhere.

Superficially, the Suez invasion was a blow at Nuri's rival Nasser and therefore a blessing. But for the British and French to attack Egypt in company if not in cahoots with the No. i Arab enemy, Israel, caused an excruciating crisis for the Pasha. He called a 2 a.m. Cabinet meeting that lasted until dawn.

That night he decided to offer help to Nasser, break relations with France, advise the British that Iraq would not sit with them in any Baghdad Pact affairs till further notice, and proclaim that Israel must "be wiped out." His gestures did not stop the Syrians from dynamiting the Iraq pipeline to the Mediterranean--at a cost to the Iraqi government of $60 million in oil income lost. "Oh, dear Iraq," cried Radio Damascus, "demolish your prison walls, free yourself of your chains and the villainy of Nuri as-Said."

Pro-Nasser feeling inside Iraq erupted in violence at Mosul. Najaf and Kut al Hai. where some 20 people were killed in street fighting. In Baghdad a mob of 2,000, led by students, flaunted Nasser portraits and shouted: "Down with the monarchy. Long live Abdel Nasser, leader of all the Arabs." Nuri proclaimed martial law, closed the schools, suspended Parliament, and ordered hundreds of Iraqis thrown in jail. His police also arrested three Egyptian officers on charges of plotting the Pasha's assassination. "The man has not been born who can assassinate me." growled Nuri, who totes a pistol on his hip whenever he goes out in society. Before taking off last week for the Karachi meeting, Nuri at last lifted the martial law: the crisis was safely past.

Nuri makes a much easier job of ruling than younger, flashier strongmen. In Baghdad he rises at 6 and downs grapefruit and coffee while listening to the Voice of America morning news. After a first round of conferences with ministers on scrambler phones, he breakfasts again, on eggs, and takes off across the Tigris bridge to his office in a Chrysler (with a carload of plainclothesmen trailing along behind).

After telling aides how to answer his mail (the only letters he writes himself are weekly notes to two grandsons at school in England), he bustles home to catch the BBC's 2 p.m. newscast before lunch and a long nap. If the weather is right he may then take tea by the Tigris, tossing food to a dozen black ducks that paddle up when he calls. He dines at home almost always with the same friends--Propaganda Boss Khalil Ibrahim, Development Chief Dhia Jafar, and Finance Minister Khalil Kenna, 47, a gifted ex-leftist who is often touted as the minister most likely to succeed. Nearly all his old cronies have died, most of them violently.

Several times a week he visits the palace, which counts for a good deal in Iraqi politics by reason of its currently close ties with the army and the suave intriguing of Crown Prince Abdul Illah. (Unlike his cousin Hussein in Jordan, 22-year-old King Feisal is not yet a force in state decisions.) The old Pasha also visits his Defense Ministry desk, but these days his greatest interest is lavished on the work of the Iraq Development Board, which he watches over like a proud mother hen.

For a New Eden. Six years ago Nuri persuaded the British-run Iraq Petroleum Co. to give him a 50-50 profit split such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia enjoyed. He had already set up the nonpolitical Development Board, and awarded it 70% of all state oil revenues, so that the whole nation, not just a few wealthy princes, would benefit. The board set out to recreate in the Valley of the Two Rivers the verdant paradise that existed before the marauding Mongols of Hulagu Khan in 1258 wrecked the ancient irrigation system and dried up the Garden of Eden.

Since 1950, with the help of foreign experts (a U.S. and a British economist are full members of the board), Iraq's unique agency has built, started or planned 16 dams between the snow-veined mountains of Kurdistan and the steaming shores of the Persian Gulf. It has completed two great barrages that this year caught the flood waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and led them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream its 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. Land under cultivation has jumped 40% as 20,000 families (an estimated 150,000 persons) have settled on newly reclaimed Go-acre tracts. The board has provided Iraq with oil refineries, textile plants, sugar mills. Since the board went to work six years ago, the number of primary schools has risen from 1,070 to 1,748, secondary schools from 108 to 152, hospitals from 82 to 121. And in the works for the capital is a new university. Saudi Arabia, with greater oil revenues, has nothing comparable to show.

Purging the Planners. The Development Board has made its share of mistakes. It failed to train enough people to staff the new schools, hospitals, factories. From a political point of view, it was too slow to add what experts call "impact" projects, i.e., works that hungry, impoverished Iraqis can see in front of them, instead of distant dams that take years to build. The board started only last year to build its first 2,500 low-cost housing units in the capital. Nuri confessed to Parliament last fall that the highway-building program had been "a failure," owing to inadequate preliminary surveys before laying roads across a country whose water table lies often a foot or two below the surface. After critics charged that grafting was widespread, Nuri last year appointed a committee of judges who have since ordered dismissal of 300 officials, including seven provincial governors.

Because they are his most powerful political supporters, Nuri has blocked all moves to curb the tribal sheiks' hold on their land. "Time will break up the big estates," he says. "We don't want to force socialism down peoples' throats."

But it is simply not possible to pour $250 million into an economy, as Nuri has done since 1951, without setting off great social changes. The word that there are plenty of jobs to be had in Baghdad has penetrated to the most backward sharecroppers, and peasants are arriving in Baghdad from the big southern estates at the rate of ten truckloads a day. Nuri's success in suppressing last winter's disorders he rightly regards as "the political first fruits of our development program. Our people have jobs. They live better now. A man making $2.80 a day on a steady job does not take a few cents from an organizer who wants him to join a riot."

The Plains of Abraham. In seven years, Iraq's per capita income has advanced from $84 to $140. It is the Development Board's proclaimed purpose to double the country's standard of living in the next ten years. So far, the country bears little resemblance to the Eden where men first created agriculture and civilization. The western deserts are so flat that huge, air-conditioned buses arrow across them between Baghdad and Damascus by night at 80 miles an hour, navigating by compass and the stars. Ur, the great city from which Abraham went forth 4,000 years ago to settle the land of Canaan, now lies not far from salty swamps peopled by neolithic Arabs who live in circular boats made of rushes calked with bitumen. The Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, the pleasure domes of Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad, all created when the valley sustained populations three times as great as now, are vanished with Nineveh and Tyre.

Booming Baghdad. The characteristic sight of the Iraqi countryside has long been the earth-floored mud hut--cold and dank in winter, a noisome furnace in summer--in which 90% of the population subsist in barebone poverty and endemic disease. Today, the old order it represents is changing under the impact of Nuri's development program. The population of Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1,000,000), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board's new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board's bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading be yond the dikes where handsome villas are rising for the new, well-to-do middle classes. So many streets are still unpaved that during the rainy season hostesses hire servants to carry guests from their cars into the house. Shantytowns mushroom all over Baghdad, one of the worst of them in a palm grove barely 500 yards from Nuri's house.

Under Development Board plans, mud-colored Baghdad is going to take on splendor before long. France's Le Corbusier will build a sports stadium, and 88-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright returned enthusiastically from Baghdad last week ready to create an opera house "like nothing in the world" on an island in the Tigris. By any planner's standards, these should qualify as "impact projects."

Says a senior U.S. diplomat: "We feel Iraq is potentially if not right now the brightest spot in the area. There's hope here to build something solid, and with Nuri in power we can work and build. He has our complete support, and we do not mind the rest of the world knowing it." The valley once so famed may yet blossom anew as the Valley of the Three Rivers--the Tigris, the Euphrates and the oil.

*Nuri's sister Sabria, widow of a Turkish officer, still receives the allowance ($5.60) from Baghdad's religious authorities. -If Left, Nuri asSaid; right, T. E. Lawrence.

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