Upturn in Baghdad

In Iraq, where politics are seldom clear-cut, recent visitors have been impressed with a change of mood. Thirty months ago, Westerners were being taunted in the streets of Baghdad; today they are more welcome than in most other Middle East capitals.

Shops once again are crammed with British goods, which until recently were all but barred by government policies. West Germans, Austrians, Swiss and Lebanese are back in force building bridges and ports. To stimulate the long-stalled economy, the government announced that 70% of all oil revenues, which have been largely diverted to the purchase of Czech arms and the construction of officers' villas, would henceforth go to big development projects.

New Style. Iraqis date the change from last November, when the Communists organized a strike of tobacco workers in Baghdad. Apparently, this was too much for Iraq's "sole leader," Major General Abdel Kerim Kassem. Army troops turned on the demonstrators, brusquely broke up the strike. Since then, 28 Communists have been condemned to death and ten others sentenced to terms of life imprisonment for atrocities perpetrated in the 1959 rioting. Party workers have been purged from government offices, the army and the trade unions. The Russian ambassador himself recently got a two-hour raking over from Kassem, who accused the Russians of acting "in bad faith" and "tying political strings to loans." The 26 factories that the Communist bloc had promised to build in Iraq were still on paper. Kassem himself seems content with the Westward drift of things. His press has been branding the local Communists "traitors" and "foreign agents."

Physically mended from bullet wounds sustained when an assassin tried to kill him in the fall of 1959, Kassem has put his bloodstained tunic on display at his office in the Defense Ministry. Kassem describes his escape from death as an act of providence. As a result, his style of rule now often seems to transcend the merely earthly. He roams his curfewed capital in the early hours of the morning visiting bakeries "to taste the people's bread." He engages in talks with the goatskin-clad poor who live in reed huts on the mud flats of Baghdad's Tigris river. He loses no opportunity to expound on the mystic ideals of "Arab brotherhood," and has even re-established politely formal relations with the U.A.R., whose rulers, not long ago, stood accused in Iraqi public opinion of having engineered the attempt to kill him.

Puffed Candle. That did not keep Kassem from making new efforts to establish himself as a counterweight to the U.A.R.'s Nasser within the Arab League. Last week, at Kassem's invitation, Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba rejoined the councils of the Arab League; he walked out in a huff two years ago on the straightforward ground that Nasser had tried to have him assassinated.

To celebrate the occasion, Kassem had planned a warm reception when Tunisia's delegate arrived for the Arab League meeting held in Baghdad. He was disconcerted when 10,000 Iraqis flocked to the airport to greet not the Tunisian but the U.A.R.'s Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi, shouting "Union under Nasser soon!"

But in the new, relaxed atmosphere, no one seemed much upset. Even pro-Nasserites seem in no hurry to unhorse Kassem. "He could probably be puffed out like a candle, but he may very well go on for a long time," said one pro-Nasserite comfortably. The freedom from tension has pervaded all levels and classes. At a political rally recently, Sole Leader Kassem orated to his working-class audience: "Like you, I have only one shirt." Out of the crowd came a heckler's cry: "Before you came, I had two." Such casual impudence belongs to Iraq's new mood.

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