Hashimite Huddle

What should rouse less comment than a friendly visit by a nephew to an uncle? But last week, when Hashimite nephew Prince Abdul Illah, Regent of Iraq, went to call on Hashimite uncle King Abdullah in the dingy Trans-Jordan capital of Amman, many an Arab politician fidgeted. That the Regent's fellow traveler was Nuri Es-Said Pasha, perennial Prime Minister of Iraq (temporarily out of office), did not add to their comfort. Arabs suspected that a familiar bee was buzzing in the Iraqis' sedarah.* With British prompting, they thought, the Hashimite family was talking of uniting its holdings in a big Hashimite kingdom--a development which would rouse no enthusiasm in rival Arab states.

The British Way. A Britain which was retreating in the rest of the world still held fast to oil, pipelines and bases in the Hashimite kingdoms. The three who had their heads together in Amman were thoroughly used to working the British way. There was little about the dapper, languid Abdul Illah (who likes Bond Street clothes, flowers in his buttonhole and cocker spaniels) to show that he was the son of a desert king, Ali of the Hejaz, who had been pushed from his throne,in 1925 by Arabia's flowerless, buttonless Ibn Saud.

His adviser, 59-year-old Nuri Pasha, who fought for the British in World War I, is one of the few Arab statesmen who will publicly say what many secretly think--that until the world has settled down a bit, Arabs had better rely on British support. Last week Nuri said it again: "If [the United Nations] proves unable to provide security, we shall have to find other means to guarantee our safety." Everyone knew that by "other means" he meant a continued alliance with the British. Nuri added that there would probably be no early revision of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi treaty.

That treaty insured British paramountcy in Iraq. It gave Britain: 1) the right to maintain two important bases; 2) management of the Iraqi State Railways and the oil port of Basra; 3) the monopoly of providing all foreign technical experts needed by the Iraqi Government.

A Shining Deed? Presiding serenely over the British machine is tall (6 ft.), urbane, 45-year-old Stewart Perowne, able adviser in Britain's Bagdad Embassy. Twenty years a Middle East hand, Perowne even more than the British Ambassadors (who come & go) symbolizes British rule in Iraq. Unlike most British officials, he openly plugs for a larger Hashimite kingdom. A favorite Perowne remark: "Iraq shines like a good deed in a naughty world."

Most Iraqis doubted whether Iraq (or Perownia, as their country is sometimes called) shone any brighter after 30 years of British control. The wretched fellahin are as wretched as ever, the elite of landowners and sheiks as firmly entrenched, and Iraq's economy as firmly tied to Britain's. The literacy rate is still somewhere between 5 and 10%; public health service is almost nonexistent.

What then was Britain's good deed? "In the first place," Stewart Perowne told a TIME correspondent recently," "we created the country." Britain's main gift has been the fundamentals of orderly government and security. Before World War I no one dared go out Bagdad's South Gate after dark for fear of bandits. Now it is relatively safe. Many Iraqis used to walk about with one hand on their heads, to ward off djinns. Now few do.

Nuri Pasha knew that the British had insured oil-rich Iraq against Russian pressure as well as against bandits and djinns. If the Hashimites and their advisers who gathered in Amman last week decided on a customs and military union, it would be because the British thought the time had come for a stronger Hashimite state. But such things move slowly in the Arab world. Perhaps, as the Arabs say, union would be achieved bukra fil mishmish (tomorrow, when the apricots bloom)--a day which never comes.

*Unsightly Iraqi national headdress, resembling oversized U.S. Army fore-&-aft caps, known to Westerners as the only headgear a man can) leave on a Middl'e East hatrack without fear of theft.

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