The Dry & the Wet

Telephones jingled in five Baghdad embassies. A procession of limousines, national flags aflutter from their fenders, drove up outside Iraq's yellow brick Foreign Ministry. One by one, the ambassadors of Britain, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan marched inside to receive a note from Iraq's Foreign Minister Hashim Jawad. When they had left, the U.S.'s gangling Ambassador John Jernegan was ushered in and got the same word verbally. Later, at a press conference to which Western correspondents were not invited, Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, Iraq's strongman, announced publicly what the ambassadors had been told privately: Iraq was withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact.

The decision had been implicit from the beginning, in the revolt that toppled the throne, killed the King and his pro-Western Premier, Nuri asSaid, and brought Kassem's army clique to power last July. The timing was what counted.

Forget Nasser. The State Department and the British Foreign Office, not yet abandoning all hope of Kassem, put Kassem's action down to his desire to express solidarity with the Arab world. By withdrawing from the pact, Kassem freed himself from Nasser's accusation that Iraq was still allied to the "imperialist" West. To his assembled editors last week, Kassem suggested: "Forget Nasser. Do not waste time replying to criticism from abroad that does not bother us at all."

But it was plain that Nasser was getting himself committed to the downfall of Kassem, and to the Communists who surround him. Last week Nasser made the sternest accusation one Arab can make about another: that Kassem was "soft" on the Jews, having refused (said Nasser) to join in a "decisive battle" against Israel last fall. And at Cairo's 1,000-year-old Al Azhar University, world center of Islamic learning, the rector or "sheik of Islam" urged the Iraqi faithful "to rise as one man" in defense against Communism's alien and atheist threat to the faith.

Beset by the possibility that the Iraqi antagonism to him might spread to his own unhappy northern province of Syria, Nasser traveled one day to an aluminum army hut hurriedly set up on the border between Syria and Lebanon. There, protected by tanks and antiaircraft guns, he met Lebanon's President Fuad Chehab for the first time. Reported gist of their agreement: Chehab would back Nasser in his dispute with Iraq if Nasser guaranteed that he would not try to incorporate Lebanon into his United Arab Republic.

Red Desires. It may be that Kassem withdrew from the Baghdad Pact only to quiet Nasser. But the more worrisome likelihood is that Kassem is responding to another pressure on him. The Reds, in the guise of helping him in his consolidation of power, have made four demands on him. The first was to denounce the Baghdad Pact, as he has just done. The second was to purge his army and his administration of people whom the Communists object to. This too is going on. The Reds demand vengeance against all who participated in the Mosul rebellion (TIME, March 23). Of the original junta of two dozen army officers who overthrew the monarchy, five have now been purged. About 120 officers above the rank of major have reportedly been retired. Thousands of civil servants have been removed from their posts.

From Baghdad each day, the nation is treated by television to a noisy assizes when a fanatic army colonel, Fadhil Mahdawi, rants against the "traitors" in the dock. Press censorship is now in the hands of an army veterinarian, Colonel Loutfi Tahir, who fills the newspapers with Red propaganda. Last week Iraqi authorities expelled three U.S. correspondents--TIME's William McHale, CBS's Winston Burdett, U.P.I.'s Larry Collins--on short notice, and Kassem's office said he was helpless to save them.*

Revolutionary Fire. Perhaps Kassem was already too committed to the Communists to break free from them. But he has so far not capitulated to the other two Red demands that would clear the way for their takeover. He has not yet executed such "traitors" as his onetime sidekick and coconspirator, Colonel Abdul Salam Mohammed Aref. And he has so far resisted giving arms to "the people"--i.e., the so-called Popular Resistance Force, which would be a Red militia.

At his press conference last week, Kassem commiserated with an editor whose offices had been smashed by Red-led street mobs. "People should not have done that," mused General Kassem. "They should have left matters in the hands of the law. But the revolution is a fire, and in this fire both the dry and the wet burn." It was a metaphor to ponder.

*When TIME's Denis Fodor arrived in Baghdad that day on a plane from Beirut, with a valid visa for Iraq, he was refused permission to stay.

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