Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. A year ago, Iraq seemed a pillar of the U. Since then, this perspective has become confused or worse.
Walter Z. Laqueur discusses recent developments and the outlook for the future. It is no longer so clear that the chasm has been bridged. The tenor of recent exchanges between the two capitals has been hostile. The man who remained hiding in his house until 4 P. The man who was to be tried by a military tribunal on July 17 for stealing coalbags from army stores has no right to place himself above army officers whose clean hands held guns to purge the country of corruption and graft.
The road to Moscow does not lead through the Syrian and Iraqi Communist parties. Baghdad is the main trouble center, and for once the Western powers are not directly involved on either side. What started as a routine military coup, Latin American style, soon became something much bigger. For all the ingredients of a revolutionary situation were present in Baghdad. The Hashemite monarchy and the Nuri government were extremely unpopular, and the whole political and social structure of Iraq wasβto put it mildlyβantiquated.
Power resided in the hands of a small group of professionals and several hundred semi-feudal sheikhs. Most of the middle class, let alone the rest of the population, had no stake in Iraqi political life and had been antagonized in some degree by the authoritarian regime. An old-fashioned regime, it could not compete with the streamlined plebiscitarian dictatorships that had emerged in Cairo and Damascus. Major economic development projects were under way, but economic progress, however beneficial, could not alone stem the tide of revolution.
What Iraq had desperately needed for years was not so much economic development as sweeping political and social reforms, reforms tantamount to a bourgeois revolution. The events in Iraq since the July coup are a direct consequence of the years of procrastination.
