The Boiler

Muffled by censorship and tight military control, the noises coming out of Iraq last week nonetheless sounded like the laborings of an untended boiler approaching the point of explosion. Iraq's newspapers triumphantly reported the capture of some of the men who had almost succeeded in killing Premier Abdul Karim Kassem (TIME, Oct. 19)--but gave no names. Scarcely had these good tidings been announced when Radio Baghdad trumpeted that another assassination plot had been uncovered--but gave no details.

Iraq's Arab enemies, led by the United Arab Republic's President Nasser, laid plans to intervene when and if civil war broke out between Iraq's Communists and antiCommunists. In Syria, the junior member of the U.A.R., 3,000 Palestinians, trained as Nasserite commandos, were being held in readiness barely 100 miles from the strategic Iraqi city of Mosul, and Bedouin tribes along the frontier had been organized into fighting units by Iraqi officers who had fled the brutal justice of Kassem's People's Court. From Jordan, where young King Hussein still dreams of succeeding to the vanished Iraqi throne of his murdered cousin, King Feisal, came reports of troop and aircraft movements toward the Iraqi border. And on Iraq's southern frontier, Saudi Arabian agents, anxious to prevent either Hussein or the Communists from taking power in Baghdad, moved among border tribesmen spreading money and promises.

In Baghdad itself, daily bulletins continued to insist that Kassem was recovering nicely from his wounds, would soon leave the hospital. On that happy day, Iraqi citizens were promised free admission to movie theaters, half fare on trains, and free circumcision for their newborn sons. But like any other Arab strongman, Kassem derives his power less from the people than from the army. At week's end, from his hospital bed, "the sole leader'' made a public declaration of confidence in the loyalty of his troops: "I can assure you there is not in the whole of the Middle East an army as strongly united as the army of our young republic." To some listeners, it sounded less like a statement of fact than a cry for help.

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