Swing from the Left

The cooling winds of moderation continue to blow across the Middle East. Last week in Iraq, reversing a virtually uninterrupted forced march to extreme socialism and dictatorship that began in 1958, Premier Abdel Rahman Bazzaz suggested Baghdad's sweeping nationalization laws had gone too far, declared it was time for a turn to private industry and Western foreign in vestments. Moreover, guaranteeing in dividual rights in a fashion unheard of in modern Iraq, Bazzaz, the quiet, Western-oriented technician whom President Abdul Salem Aref installed two months ago, decreed that henceforth no Iraqi citizen may be arrested without a warrant signed personally by himself or two other high officials. Strongman Aref himself chimed in to announce that "Iraqi socialism is based on the Koran and not on Karl Marx."

The Home Front. It was startling talk and clearly followed the line toward moderation taken by Egypt's Nasser in recent months. Nasser eschews talk of war, whether against Israel or the Yemeni royalists. At the Arab summit in Casablanca last September, he counseled fellow delegates to concentrate on setting their own houses in order, and showed the way by replacing left-leaning Premier Ali Sabry's government with a new, efficiency-minded one headed by Zakaria Mohieddin.

Mohieddin has jailed dozens of Communists, reopened negotiations with Washington to get U.S. food shipments started again, hired pro-Western Mahmoud Younis, director of the Suez Canal, to reorganize Egypt's creaking transport and communications. Last week Cairo even announced that it hoped to infuse some new capitalist life into the long-moribund Cairo Stock Exchange, and declared Port Said a duty-free zone.

Betrayal. The Arab swing from the left is dictated by the hard facts of economic life: the need for Western aid, investment and know-how, the failure of extreme socialism to salvage the hemorrhaging economies of Egypt and Iraq. Algeria, too, under Colonel Houari Boumedienne, has retreated from deposed Strongman Ben Bella's far-left bent. And when Ben Bella went, Nasser lost his only real revolutionary pal in the Arab world.

Indeed, the only diehard Middle Eastern nation left on the militant left at the moment is Syria, where the ruling socialist Baath Party clearly feels betrayed by the new look. "Arab revolutionaries cannot fail to note the current reactionary tide in the Middle East," said the chief party newspaper in Damascus last week. However the hot heads in Syria might feel, the rest of the Middle East was plainly looking forward to the welcome touch of cooler, quieter political weather.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.