After the Baghdad Pact

Although John Foster Dulles was the prime mover in planning the Middle East's "Northern Tier" grouping of anti-Communist states back in 1953, the U.S. has never joined the Baghdad Pact. When Turkey's Premier Adnan Menderes last year asked why, President Eisenhower reportedly replied that if the U.S. had moved to join, Israel would have asked similar guarantees and the U.S. would have had to refuse them, thus provoking pro-Israeli pressures in the U.S. and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. At last week's meeting of Baghdad powers in London, Secretary Dulles announced that the U.S. had become a "full partner" with those Baghdad Pact members present at its London meeting.

The Baghdad Pact is no longer what it was now that its only Arab affiliate, Iraq, will probably soon opt out. In some ways the Northern Tier alliance is tidier. Even Israel should be less troubled by an agreement that will no longer deliver arms to an Arab nation sworn to wipe out Israel. (Shortly before the coup, the U.S. delivered five jets to Iraq.) But the remaining members of the pact--Britain, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan--were shaken by Iraq's defection, and the Moslem nations in particular demanded dramatic proof of U.S. support.

After dinner at the Carlton Gardens residence of British Host Selwyn Lloyd, they told Dulles that they would have to go home this time with stronger proof of U.S. solidarity. Even when Dulles said, "The nations here do not have to have any fear whatsoever that the U.S., even at great risk, would not maintain the integrity of our friends," the Mideast diplomats were unappeased. Next day, passing up the buffet lunch, Dulles drafted a few sentences and cleared them in two fast telephone calls to President Eisenhower.

That evening, tacked on as a fourth paragraph, Dulles' penciled promise to back the "security and defense" of all cosigners transformed the London session's communique into a "declaration." The declaration, explained Dulles, makes the U.S. a "full partner" with surviving Baghdad Pact members, and could supersede the Baghdad Pact, should Iraq drop out.

The Secretary of State cannot make treaties without Senate approval, but a U.S. aide explained that Dulles had, in effect, only done something like signing agreements with three nations individually. The importance of the move, said the aide, was chiefly psychological, since the U.S. is already pledged to aid Turkey under NATO, Pakistan through SEATO, and Iran under the congressional resolution known as the Eisenhower Doctrine.

Dulles said he "expected" that the pledge would be backed by substantial boosts in military and economic aid to the three Northern Tier countries. Their importance as a link in the chain of anti-Soviet defenses would be undiminished by the defection of Iraq, whose territory does not even touch the Soviet frontiers.* Around this might grow something like the Colombo Plan, an 18-nation agreement for economic cooperation to which the U.S. also adhered without a formal treaty. To mystified members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State Department's William Rountree explained that by signing the London Declaration the U.S. had not in fact taken on any new commitments at all.

* Though all defense plans assumed logistic connections across Iraq, and the Iraqi rebels apparently captured a cache of the pact's plans in Baghdad, including lists of agents in the Arab world. Radio Cairo, whose reputation for veracity assays amazing low, has already begun to broadcast what it declares is information from the seized records.

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