Double Trouble

Brother screamed at Arab brother last week in a way that suggested that Arab brotherhood is a sometime thing. In Cairo, President Nasser's marchers swung dead rats and dogs from mock gallows to show their hate for Premier Kassem and his Iraqi Communist allies. In Baghdad, Kassem supporters plastered the city with portraits of President Nasser's grinning countenance superimposed on pictures of donkeys, hyenas and dancing girls.

Nasser's Voice of the Arabs raged that Kassem was an apostate whose followers had torn up the Koran outside his office door shouting: "Death to Arab nationalism, death to Islam!" Nasser, who hitherto has hesitated to make a jihad, or holy war, against his Arab enemies, now invoked this highly charged cry against the Kassem regime and its atheist Communist comrades. (Use of such dangerous religious passions for political purposes may be effective against the Reds, but it also upsets Lebanese Christians and other non-Islamic Arabs.)

Fast as the Communists could pass the ammunition, Radio Baghdad fired back that Nasser was the honorary President of the Egyptian Freemasons' lodge and hence, naturally enough, a partner of Zionism. Who was to blame for the unsuccessful Mosul uprising? "The blood of Mosul's free men will haunt you, Gamal," railed the Baghdad announcer. Taunted Radio Cairo: "Iraqis now call their government 'the rule of the Red butcher.'

Most Favored Nation. Caught somewhat in the middle was Soviet Russia. Last week, "pained" at the anti-Communist shouts of Communism's first Middle East beneficiary, Nikita Khrushchev blandly complained that Nasser was only fussing because the Iraqis would not let him annex their country. Though relations with Nasser "will continue as before," said Khrushchev, "our sympathy with Iraq is greater," because "Iraq has a more progressive order of things."

Khrushchev delivered this "friendly" warning at a Moscow reception marking the signing with Iraq of a major new $138 million Soviet loan agreement. The agreement, pledging the Iraqis a twelve-year credit for building a steel mill and at least 14 factories, thrust the Soviet Union into Britain's old place at the center of oil-rich Iraq's economic development. The first 80 Soviet technicians, said Iraq's Communist-lining Economics Minister Ibrahim Kubba. would arrive within a month.

Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed his wish to continue supporting Nasser, but at his press conference on Berlin threw in a few side remarks about the dictator of the Nile that were meant to wound and were bound to sting. "President Nasser," said Khrushchev, "is a rather young man and rather hotheaded, and he took upon himself more than his stature permitted. He shouldn't do it. He might strain himself."

Russia now faces the West's old dilemma of trying to keep friendships in balance within the area. For years the Soviet Union has pursued two easily defined aims in the Middle East: 1) the immediate one of ending Western-sponsored defense pacts and neutralizing the area, and so creating what Leninists call a "zone of peace"; 2) the ultimate, but much more ambitious aim, of turning the Middle East into a "zone of socialism." Last summer's sudden overturn of the pro-Western regime of King Feisal and Nuri asSaid in Iraq radically changed Russian aspirations. An Iraqi Communist Party emerged intact from Nuri's jails and from underground and successfully joined with Kassem in opposing the merger of Iraq and the U.A.R. on Nasser's terms. Communism and Nasserism became locked in conflict.

Both Camps. For Khrushchev now to cut off his promised aid for Nasser's Aswan High Dam would be to show all Asia and Africa that Soviet aid is in fact tied with strings. Though the Communists were now in control of Baghdad's streets, did they dare bid for full control of Iraq? If they did, could they avoid a new revolutionary situation, in which powerful Arabic emotions would be turned against them? Dare they risk the West's mistake of opposing Nasser in such a way as to strengthen him?

Obviously the Kremlin hoped to keep its influence in both Arab camps. But could the Kremlin restrain its Iraqi partisans without in time destroying their enthusiasm? And was it enough for the Kremlin to remind Nasser sensibly of his economic dependence on Moscow? That unpredictable man had been known before to prefer pride to profit.

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