Iraq's Revolution

year has passed since Iraq's Quatorze Juillet. Its immediate cause was a military coup d'Gtat one of the many which have overthrown constitutional regimes in Asia and the Arab world, but one which seems to have taken Khrushchev, Nasser, Eisenhower, Macmillan and also most Iraqis by surprise. The regime of Faisal II and Nuri al-Sa'id had not been manifestly tottering. (Its merits and achievements were described in the Summer 1957 issue of the International Journal.) It had stood firm through an onslaught of mendacious propaganda, calls for revolt and assassination plots, directed against it from two sources from Soviet Russia and Communism, and from Nasser's Egypt and the Syrian Ba'th party. It had, however, antagonized most of the young generation of educated Iraqis (including, presumably, army and air force officers). It had been repressive; its foreign policy had not served Iraqi interests well; and it had failed to undertake adequate social reforms. The younger intelligentsia (as in other Arab countries) were in a mood at once nationalist and leftist. They were also (unlike the Egyptians) demanding freedom of expression and of party political activity. Their common yearning for radical change somewhat obscured their contradictions of purpose. Both the communist and the Nasser-Ba'th attitudes to Iraq also contained contradictions. The communist line, as set by the Syrian communist leader Khaled Bekdash, was the united front against imperialism and feudalism. This implied a certain freedom of action for national bourgeois parties and a guiding rather than dominant role for communists, at any rate pending the emergence of a workers' class through industrialization. Yet Soviet propaganda continued to foster Kurdish

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