(2 of 2)
As for the Communists of Baghdad, they were still going into jails. The result was one of the biggest single Red propaganda barrages since the Reds charged the U.S. with using germ warfare in Korea. Pravda's correspondent claimed, "I saw tanks crush women and children," and reported the "physical annihilation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqi democrats and patriots.'' The Pravda man went looking for Aziz Sharif, a 1962 Lenin Peace prizewinner at the office of the Peace Partisans League (a euphemism for Red militia). A soldier on guard at the office told him. "That dog has long since been jailed.'' The Soviet Red Cross even appealed to the International Red Cross to help protect Communists, whom it preferred to call ''the democratic patriots victimized by bloody persecution in Iraq."
When the first hectic days were over, the novices would get around to answering Gamal Abdel Nasser's cry for union. At week's end Iraq's thinking was summed up by Foreign Minister Shahib, who proposed a joint meeting of the four "liberated" Arab states (Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria) to "coordinate work among them in various fields with a unionist revolutionary and socialist tendency."