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Free for What? The Pasha's English, despite innumerable trips to Britain and a lifetime of intimate collaboration with Britons, is barely adequate, and he is no orator in Turkish, German, or even his native Arabic. Tapping a knee, waving a hearing aid as he gropes for words, he rasps out his objectives: "Arab unity and progress, to see universities here, and wealth, to close the gap between the Arabs and the advanced nations. There has been a certain amount of progress since my childhood, especially in the past ten or 15 years, but the gap is still big. It will take a generation to close. I don't believe any Arab leader should make dangerous, revolutionary changes. Changing the lives and minds of people cannot be done quickly. You cannot inject a child two days old with a serum and make him ten years old. Even if somehow you succeed, he will never be normal. We must always calculate the need for time in everything."
Corrosively realistic, Nuri thrusts aside such Nasser catch phrases as "positive neutrality" that might win him a transient popularity. Says Nuri: "History would curse me if I appealed to the emotion of the masses at the expense of the national interest. For a small country, neutrality can be catastrophic. Iraq is incapable of blocking East or West militarily, or of exploiting its oil itself. If we tried to be neutral, our oil would remain underground, poverty would spread above the ground, and Communism would triumph." If these seem strong words in the Arab world of today, they are the utterance of a strong man emerging at last in the strongest position of his life.
The Happy One. How this son of Baghdad came into the world with a pair of blue eyes is a story that Scheherazade might have told. Three centuries ago, there was a mullah in Baghdad named Lowlow who was intensely proud of the mosque under his care. One day an invading Persian army overran Baghdad. In the kind of insult that Persian Moslems of the Shiite rite delighted in visiting upon the holy places of the rival Sunni sect, a cavalry outfit stabled its horses in the mosque. Lowlow set forth for faraway Constantinople to tell the Sultan of Turkey of this sacrilege, and the journey on foot took six months. The Sultan was so enraged that he sent an army back to Baghdad with Lowlow. The Persians were driven out, but Lowlow found that his wife and children had been massacred. The Sultan compassionately awarded his family an allowance of 2 lire a month in perpetuity,* and for a new wife sent Lowlow a beautiful blue-eyed Turkish girl from the royal harem.