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Short, plump and natty in a tan gabardine suit, Nuri asSaid, 13 times Prime Minister of Iraq, stepped down jauntily from his Vickers Viscount. His lips slightly parted, his hooded eyes darting back and forth as if not to miss a detail, he looked almost as if he were tasting the happy occasion.
Nuri, as he returned from Karachi, was a man who had recovered from his Suez crisis. The only Arab leader who has formally allied his country with the West, he found himself isolated last October when his chief partner, Britain, attacked (simultaneously with the hated Israelis) the biggest figure in Arab politics. Then, in the fury of Arab nationalism, it had seemed that Nuri and not Egypt's Nasser might be the one to fall. Now it was Nasser who had to fear isolation. Nuri was on top, and could survey his victory. In his hour of triumph, he resigned.
The resignation, in effect, put the seal of completion on one more term of office, the longest spell (34 months) that Iraq's durable strongman had ever stayed in the Premier's post. Even if he relinquished office, Nuri would still be the dominant figure in Iraq. But he knew that Iraq's boy king, Feisal II, would ask him to try again, and Nuri would have a chance to form a new government, with a widened Cabinet. In office or out, the adroit, 68-year-old Nuri is the senior Arab statesman of the Middle East, and the Middle East's strongest pro-Western statesman.
The land that Nuri presides over, the classic land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, is the size of California. Long known as Mesopotamia, oil-rich Iraq is now shaking itself free from the sand that has drifted over it for centuries.
Nuri and Nasser now contend for Arab leadership, but the rivalry between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile valleys is actually as old as civilization, which first dawned in their valleys. Then, competing empires reached out from Babylon and Thebes into the land between—the land of the Bible—and as the tides of conquest and reconquest ebbed and flowed, the children of Israel and other would-be neutrals were swept off now to Egyptian bondage, now to Babylonian captivity. Today, though faces in the modern Iraqi and Egyptian crowds often show startling similarity to the classic profiles on the ancient monuments around them, neither country can claim much identity with its distant past.
Today's rivalry for Arab leadership is in many respects frankly unequal. After almost four centuries of Ottoman misrule and neglect, Iraq counts fewer than 6,000,000 inhabitants; Egypt has more than 22 million. Egypt is Mediterranean, with a long record of Western influence; Iraq still feels the strong pull of its tribal past.
Yet Iraq has its geographical unity, its great river valley, and after three generations under a British-created monarch, its own political and economic institutions. Above all, it has oil. Among Arab states, Egypt and Syria lack the oil-creating wealth, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms the economy that can absorb it. Iraq, alone of all Arab nations, has both, and on the wave of its oil royalties it has launched an ambitious program of economic development that is transforming the political balances of the region.