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The chance to strike came on the night of last July 13. Kassem's 19th and Aref's 20th brigades received orders to move through Baghdad on their way to friendly Jordan, then beset by fear of revolt within its own borders. Following Kassem's plan, Aref's men instead rolled into Baghdad at 4:30 a.m., seized the radio station, pulled all switches at the telephone exchange, and, lobbing a mortar shell through a back wall of the royal palace, mowed down the King and members of the royal household as they stumbled in confusion out the front door. Premier Nuri asSaid, cunning veteran of two generations of Arab politics and unflinching friend of the West escaped from his house disguised as a woman—only to be hunted to death and dragged dead through the streets the next day. At noon of the first day, Kassem joined Aref and set up the headquarters of the triumphant revolution in the Defense Ministry.
Plotters Without Plans. The regime the free officers overthrew was probably the most unpopular of any in the Middle East. With iron hand, old Nuri had suppressed the political ambitions of the middle class, banned student activity, outlawed trade unions, forbidden freedom of the press. Scorning any mass appeal, Nuri governed by alliance with several hundred semifeudal sheiks who held 94% of the land. Thus, though Iraq is the only Middle East country with plenty of both oil and water, its peasants were as wretched as any in all Asia. And though much of the $200 million-a-year revenue that the government drew from the British-run Iraq Petroleum Co. was devoted to economic development, Nuri's long-range irrigation and dam-building projects made little immediate difference to the vast majority of Iraq's 6,500,000 people.
Kassem and his fellow plotters were obsessed with the need to change all this. Their prime task, Kassem repeatedly declared, was "improving the living standards of our population and saving them from dwelling in slums." Aside from this vague expression of good intentions, the new military rulers had no political program at all. But, because the tide of Arab nationalism was running high everywhere, Colonel Aref had a somewhat hazy idea for closer relations with Nasser's United Arab Republic. In Kassem's mind was a similarly muddled idea for setting up a neutralist Iraqi state.
The Bargain. In this planlessness and confusion of purposes lay the seeds of Iraq's present chaos. When Aref flew off to Damascus for a much-publicized meeting with Nasser, and Egyptian MIGs began operating on Iraqi airfields, Kassem recoiled, began looking for allies against the eloquent Aref and his Nasserite followers. The Communists, who, alone among Iraqi political parties, had emerged from Nuri's police state lean, hard and well organized, were only too ready to give Kassem the help he wanted—for a price.
Anti-Communists charge that the Communist bargain was urged on Kassem by his chief aide, burly, Red-lining Colonel Wasfi Tahir (who, incredibly, held the same job under Nuri). Kassem himself may have failed to see the dangers in the bargain; his enemies charge that he himself flirted with Communism in his youth, and not long ago he was still capable of declaring: "I don't care about parties . . . They can call us Communists or anything else, if they like."