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Several times a week he visits the palace, which counts for a good deal in Iraqi politics by reason of its currently close ties with the army and the suave intriguing of Crown Prince Abdul Illah. (Unlike his cousin Hussein in Jordan, 22-year-old King Feisal is not yet a force in state decisions.) The old Pasha also visits his Defense Ministry desk, but these days his greatest interest is lavished on the work of the Iraq Development Board, which he watches over like a proud mother hen.
For a New Eden. Six years ago Nuri persuaded the British-run Iraq Petroleum Co. to give him a 50-50 profit split such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia enjoyed. He had already set up the nonpolitical Development Board, and awarded it 70% of all state oil revenues, so that the whole nation, not just a few wealthy princes, would benefit. The board set out to recreate in the Valley of the Two Rivers the verdant paradise that existed before the marauding Mongols of Hulagu Khan in 1258 wrecked the ancient irrigation system and dried up the Garden of Eden.
Since 1950, with the help of foreign experts (a U.S. and a British economist are full members of the board), Iraq's unique agency has built, started or planned 16 dams between the snow-veined mountains of Kurdistan and the steaming shores of the Persian Gulf. It has completed two great barrages that this year caught the flood waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and led them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream its contractors are digging drainage ditches and scooping silt from the ancient Babylonian water-distribution canals, now scheduled to be used again as in Hammurabi's time. Land under cultivation has jumped 40% as 20,000 families (an estimated 150,000 persons) have settled on newly reclaimed Go-acre tracts. The board has provided Iraq with oil refineries, textile plants, sugar mills. Since the board went to work six years ago, the number of primary schools has risen from 1,070 to 1,748, secondary schools from 108 to 152, hospitals from 82 to 121. And in the works for the capital is a new university. Saudi Arabia, with greater oil revenues, has nothing comparable to show.
Purging the Planners. The Development Board has made its share of mistakes. It failed to train enough people to staff the new schools, hospitals, factories. From a political point of view, it was too slow to add what experts call "impact" projects, i.e., works that hungry, impoverished Iraqis can see in front of them, instead of distant dams that take years to build. The board started only last year to build its first 2,500 low-cost housing units in the capital. Nuri confessed to Parliament last fall that the highway-building program had been "a failure," owing to inadequate preliminary surveys before laying roads across a country whose water table lies often a foot or two below the surface. After critics charged that grafting was widespread, Nuri last year appointed a committee of judges who have since ordered dismissal of 300 officials, including seven provincial governors.
Because they are his most powerful political supporters, Nuri has blocked all moves to curb the tribal sheiks' hold on their land. "Time will break up the big estates," he says. "We don't want to force socialism down peoples' throats."