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Pillar of Coolness. Early in 1914, tipped that the Turks were aware of his plotting, Nuri fled Constantinople and joined a revolutionary group in Basra. There the British, who had entered World War I against Turkey, found Nuri in a hospital with a chest ailment. To them, he was still a Turkish officer; they packed him off to India as a prisoner, and put him in a hill camp to convalesce. Two years later, when the British backed Sherif Hussein's Arabian revolt in the desert, Nuri talked them into letting him join the movement. In the Arabian fighting, wrote T. E. (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) Lawrence afterward, "his courage, authority and coolness" marked him as an ideal leader. "Most men talked faster under fire, and acted a betraying ease and joviality. Nuri grew calmer."
At the Paris peace conference of 1919, where the Arabs got less than Lawrence promised them, Nuri saw his burnoosed leader, Prince Feisal, become drunk and disillusioned after learning that the French intended to grab Syria for themselves. Feisal hurled the seat cushions from his car at the Quai d'Orsay as he passed by.
The Arabs proclaimed Feisal King of Syria, and Nuri his chief of staff. Driven from Damascus by the French, Feisal was offered the Iraqi throne by the British. At a spot just 50 yards from the office he works in today, Nuri asSaid proudly stood by one day in 1921 for the enthronement of his wartime chief as first sovereign of Iraq.
Mandate & Mobs. "The moment I saw him," said famed Orientalist Gertrude Bell of Nuri, "I realized we had before us a supple force which we must either use or engage in difficult combat." Nuri, too, was confronted with the choice of combat or cooperation. He chose cooperation. For the first ten years the British ruled Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, and Nuri bossed the army. In 1930 he became Premier for the first time. Iraq was gradually gaining independence, though not fast enough to suit the hotheads.
When mobs drenched a policeman with gas and burned him alive, or pickaxed a British vice consul, Nuri smashed them and executed their leaders. Sometimes his friendliness to the British cost him office for a time. He was unable to persuade the British to make the kind of Palestine settlement he favored, and when the young state of Israel beat back the invading Arab armies, Iraq was the only Arab country that refused to sign any kind of truce with the victorious Israelis. (Nuri is as publicly demagogic about the Israelis as any Arab leader, and as privately aware of their right and capacity to exist.) At times, when Nuri was out of power, things got out of hand. He came back to power the last time in the summer of 1954, and applied his standard formula: he closed 18 newspapers, won a rigged election (by a majority second only to Nasser's 99.98% poll for President last year), abolished all parties and sent hundreds of Communists to jail. Then he strengthened the loyalty of his main props in power by resisting proposals to tax the landholding sheiks, who dominate the countryside, and hiking the pay of army and police officers.