In 1957, when TIME devoted a cover story to Nuri as-Said, the pro-Western Prime Minister of IRAQ, he was spearheading a much different sort of nation-building project.
The population of Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1 million), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board's new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board's bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading...