"Death to Kassem!"

Accused of fomenting the Mosul rising, which had the bad luck to fail, Gamal Abdel Nasser appeared a very nervous man. He responded recklessly.

His first reaction was to accuse Iraqi Communists of trying to split Arab brotherhood. The man who only last month insisted that there was no connection between the "friendly" Soviet Union and the local Communist troublemakers of Syria and Egypt now proclaimed from his Damascus balcony that "the Communist Party works for foreigners. Nobody in the Arab world will respond to them because they are agents of a foreign power." Next day, under the sting of Kassem's accusations of conspiracy, Nasser dropped all pretense of soldierly comradeship with Kassem and attacked him in person as a man who fights against Arab unity. Punning on Kassem's name, which in Arabic means "splitter," he shouted that "Iraq's splitter" had fought Arab brotherhood more viciously than the hated Nuri asSaid himself. Iraqi planes, firing on the thousands of defeated rebels and tribesmen fleeing for their lives, had bombed a Syrian border village. His own air force, Nasser said righteously, could have retaliated with blows twice as strong but refrained "because the villages we would have hit are Arab villages."

Red Crescent. On the third day, still stung by the discovery that an Arab street mob could jeer his name, Nasser in Damascus ordered up what his press unblinkingly called "the largest Arab anti-Communist demonstration ever seen." The crowd had been whipped up by Friday sermons in the mosques. It was given a martyr's pageant of its own, similar to the one in Baghdad: a lugubrious cortege for a wounded Iraqi captain who had fled Mosul when the revolt failed, and died in a Damascus hospital. Nasser crowed that "the banners of Arab nationalism" would fly one day over the land now ruled by Kassem: Mosul would "not be the last rebellion so long as there remain in Iraq dictatorship, atheism and terrorism." Nasser's mob chanted: "Death to Kassem! Death to Kassem!"

Looking on at another outburst of Arab street hate, the U.S. could be grateful for being out of the line of fire for once. It was refreshing to hear Nasser speak for the first time of "a Communist reign of terror," and to have Kassem denounce not the West but Nasser. And to hear the Communists, rather than the Western powers, accused of dividing the Arab nation was a welcome change. Yet those who now instinctively saw in Nasser a welcome new ally overlooked his own heavy and continuing dependence on the Soviet bloc. London's conservative Daily Telegraph noted the irony that it was Nasser who first invited into the Middle East the Communist forces that now opposed him so effectively. But more than irony was involved. Nasser still did not rebuke Moscow, only those Arabs loyal to it. Communist countries now take 59% of Egypt's exports. They support the U.A.R.'s economy with an estimated $600 million line of credit. They supply arms--jets and tanks, and Russians to train their operators--with a lavishness that the U.S. has no intention of matching. As recently as last December, the Soviet Union acquired by agreement all construction rights for the first five years' work on Nasser's pet project, the Aswan Dam, despite a counteroffer from West Germany that would have involved no political strings.

Family Quarrel. The Russians thus had a continuing hold on both Nasser and Kassem. The British, radiating a little more optimism than perhaps the circumstances warranted, still talked of Kassem's capacity to resist, if need be, the Communist help he depended upon to crush the Mosul revolt. (So long as Baghdad keeps independent of Cairo, the British think they can save their valuable oil principality of Kuwait from falling to Nasser.) Washington's reaction was to take no sides in what it called an Arab "family quarrel." Nasser's disenchantment with the Communists may now have gone a little farther than Kassem's, but neither was yet showing any signs of the wish, or the capacity, to break with Moscow.

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