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From the long driveway that leads up to Iraq's huge, yellow-walled Ministry of Defense, a Bofors 40-mm. dual-barrel gun last week glared out at the city of Baghdad. Backing it up were leveled .50-cal. machine guns and recoilless rifles mounted on Jeeps. And even such visitors as got past the gun-toting sergeant at the ministry door were never more than a few feet from the business end of an automatic weapon. Padding up and down the corridors of the ministry, young officers of the Iraqi army kept firm hand on submachine guns or machine pistols.
As the headquarters and home-away-from-home of Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, the armed camp that is Baghdad's Defense Ministry was a faithful reflection of Iraq's mood and condition. Nine months after Kassem and a handful of co-conspirators toppled the government of hated Strongman Nuri asSaid, the land that some say was the Garden of Eden is a place of terror, plot and counterplot. Its prisons are jammed with an estimated 5,000 political prisoners and ex-officials, and its lampposts are periodically festooned with bodies. Kassem's Iraq is a place where once-eminent citizens disappear without a trace, a land where fortnight ago the dock workers of Basra, outraged by a friendly reference to Egypt's President Nasser, killed and mutilated a customs clerk and—the modern-day hallmark of Iraqi politics—dragged his body through the streets.
Above all, Iraq today is a land where cautious men do not openly criticize the Communist Party. In the last nine months, the Communists have established themselves as the sole strong political organization in the new republic, dominating the mobs, the press, the radio and parts of the government. On their behalf, a drumhead People's Court, whose broadcast proceedings are challenging Cairo's Voice of the Arabs as the Mideast's most popular radio program, fills the Iraqi people with Communist-made opinions. Such is the nightmarish atmosphere that in at least one Iraqi city (Basra) the populace is firmly convinced that Communist-led unions have prepared a list of local employers, merchants and professional men to be liquidated as soon as the opportunity offers.
Undermined by the twin Communist weapons of chaos and subversion, Iraq, until recently the West's strongest ally in the Middle East, is in real danger of becoming a Soviet satellite. Already the new Iraqi government has withdrawn from the Baghdad Pact, driven Britain's R.A.F. from its Habbaniyah base near Baghdad. Unless the slide toward Communism is halted, the Soviet Union will penetrate the very heart of the Middle East, outflank staunchly pro-Western Turkey and increasingly shaky Iran. Encamped at the head of the Persian Gulf, the U.S.S.R. could then render the rest of the Middle East militarily—and perhaps politically —indefensible by the West.