NEAR EAST: Trouble in Paradise
TIME
With trouble in Libya, trouble at home, and big trouble in the Balkans, Great Britain last week was afraid that she had trouble in Paradise as well. By week's end this month's uprising in...
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TIME
With trouble in Libya, trouble at home, and big trouble in the Balkans, Great Britain last week was afraid that she had trouble in Paradise as well. By week’s end this month’s uprising in Iraq, traditional site of the Garden of Eden, showed no signs of normal simmering down, seemed instead a nasty threat to the carotid artery of the British Empire, the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline.

Like Syria, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, Iraq, watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, was carved from the Arabic-speaking provinces of pre-war Turkey. It owes its existence to Great Britain, which helped create it after World War I, then surrendered its mandate in 1932, leaving Iraq autonomous but allied to the Empire by a treaty which gives Britain important air bases.

Coups d’état are familiar features of the Iraqi political landscape. Sportive, fast-driving, ham Radioperator King Ghazi I survived three. Since 1939 when Ghazi wrapped roadster and self around an electric-light pole, Iraq’s ruler has been his son, King Feisal II, a sloe-eyed moppet of five. Regent has been Faisal’s Anglophile uncle, weak-chinned Prince Abdul Illah. In 1940, Prince Abdul Illah quashed one would-be Army coup by seizing the Iraqi telephone service and rusticating two uppity generals.

Premier until last February was Ultra-Nationalist Seyid Rashid Ali El-Gailani. Because he refused to break off relations with Italy (which Iraq was bound by treaty to do when Italy declared war on

Britain), had allowed many an Italian troublemaker to slip from Iraq into Syria, El-Gailani was finally ousted by the Iraqi Parliament. When his Cabinet fell, Rome newspapers freely predicted trouble for the British in Iraq. Into the Premiership went Lieut. General Taha El-Hashimi, in as Foreign Minister was Britain’s great & good friend General Seyid Nuri Es-Said.

This month Regent Prince Abdul Illah went on vacation to Basra after the Parliament recessed. Hardly had he left Bagdad when things began to pop.

First came the resignation of Premier El-Hashimi. He charged that the Regent was fostering “indiscriminate favoritism and pompousness” at the Iraqi court. Before the ink was dry on the resignation, into the Government offices at Bagdad strutted the deus ex machina, El-Gailani, declaiming “I am Premier. I will save the beloved country from the poison of favoritism.” Just to make sure, civil servants called the Army, had the coup okayed.

Fulminating in Basra, Prince Abdul IIlah’s first thought was to appeal to the benevolently watchful British Government. To all Iraq, and most particularly London and Cairo, the Regent broadcast word that El-Gailani and a small group of Army officers had been seduced by Axis fifth columnists,* were trying to separate Britain from 4,000,000 tons of oil per annum and the all-important friendship of the Arab world.

Prompt was Couper El-Gailani’s reply.

Without forming a Cabinet, he hastily reconvened Parliament, which agreed to everything, promised that the new Iraq Government would respect all treaties, most especially those with Britain. Also rubber-stamped was the appointment of a new Regent, an aging, holy-minded relative of King Feisal named Sherif Sharaf.

In despair, Prince Abdul Illah tried the last shot in his locker, a counter-coup which was promptly squelched by the Basra garrison, then lit out for the sanctuary of Trans-Jordan in an R.A.F. plane.

At week’s end all was desperately tense along the Tigris and Euphrates. In Trans-Jordan’s capital city of Amman, Prince Abdul Illah sulked, conferred with General Nuri Es-Said. In Bagdad, El-Gailani played a close-to-the-chest hand of international poker, King Feisal played in the palace gardens beside the Tigris, Sherif Sharaf read the Koran. In London a weary Foreign Office profanely hoped that, since Britain could spare none of her armed forces to police Iraq, a diplomatic miracle might come to pass in the able brain of Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the new Ambassador to Iraq and a longtime inner-circle political adviser to the Iraq Government.

* Coincidentally or otherwise, 800 miles away in Ankara was Germany’s oldest fifth columnist of them all, stumble-plotting Ambassador to Turkey Franz von Papen.